Chapter 3 #2
It was important to be confident with horses. He took the halter rope firmly in hand and turned and walked away. “Come on, little girl, let’s go.”
He had to stop walking rather quickly because the mule was not coming with him.
The Dervish had a dancer’s build, all lithe strength, and the mule had a pack mule’s build, meaning that she was a rather homely creature with a short neck and straight back.
She lifted her head up high—she had really excellent eyelashes, he had to admit that, they reminded him of a boy he’d known in Karth—and planted her feet and did not move an inch.
He might as well have been trying to lead a boulder.
“Fine,” said the Dervish. He did not scream or wave his arms, because that would have been counterproductive. He’d never beaten an animal and he wasn’t about to start. He did, however, drop the rope and walk several feet away, breathing deeply.
He checked on his wielder. The man still hadn’t frozen to death. It had been at least twenty minutes, too.
My first day out of the sword in ancestors know how long, and it’s one of those days already.
The mule watched him warily, in case this was a trap.
“I’ll come back for you later,” he told the mule, trying to sound like it was all his idea. “Humans first.” He turned back to the injured man on the roadway.
The young man was shuddering now, as his body desperately tried to warm itself. Another groan escaped his lips. The Dervish bent down and caught his wielder under the arms and the thought came, unbidden, that Angharad would not have let the man die.
His lips thinned as he pressed them together. Angharad was trapped in a blade just as he was. Her idealism, such as it was, had probably not survived. And Sarkis, his commander … The Dervish spat. Sarkis would have slit the man’s throat.
Or put him beside a fire, whispered a traitor thought. Healed him or killed him outright, but not just let him die.
That wasn’t an option the Dervish had. The sword prevented him from such rough mercy. And to hell with what Commander Sarkis thought anyway. His foolishness had trapped them all in this miserable half-life. Wherever Sarkis was, whatever he was suffering, it wasn’t enough.
It should have been him on the slab, not me.
The Dervish dragged the young man off the road. Every bump woke another groan. The sword’s magic grumbled and twitched at his muscles, trying to stop him from doing harm, not sure what it should be doing.
“Sorry,” the Dervish said, as his wielder went over a particularly painful tree root.
“Think nothing of it,” he assured himself on the man’s behalf.
He dropped the man on the ground and went back to the pack animal.
She was still watching him as if he was a potential murderer of mules.
The Dervish picked up her rope. “Don’t you want to be with your owner?
” he asked coaxingly. You couldn’t let the animal think it had won, he knew that from horses.
You had to show them who was in charge. He pulled on the rope again.
The mule indicated that she knew very well who was in charge, and it wasn’t any fool human.
“Fine!” he said, after several fruitless minutes, during which he worked up a sweat much fiercer than he had from merely killing a handful of people. “Stay or go, see if I care! I didn’t want a mule anyway.” He unsnapped the rope from her halter and flung it aside.
He did want several things the mule was carrying, though. Would she let him take her packs?
The mule had clearly decided that removing her saddlebags was some kind of trick to get her to move, so she stayed stock-still and didn’t start sidling away when he reached for her. The Dervish pulled her gear loose, noting that apparently the young man had been packed for a considerable journey.
The mule swished her tail. The Dervish stepped out of range of a potential kick. He could have sworn that she was disappointed when he managed to get the last of her saddlebags off without taking a hoof to the leg.
One of the bags had been cut loose, and left books scattered across the dirt. Books … and the sword.
He picked the books up first because books were valuable things and it was a waste to leave them to be ground into the dirt.
Not because he was avoiding the sword. No.
Of course not. He knew the sword intimately, he could never escape it, he had no reason to avoid it.
He had made peace with that long ago. Absolutely.
I am merely taking care of books. Books are important.
Finally, when all the books were safely packed away and he couldn’t avoid the sword that he was absolutely not avoiding any longer, the Dervish reached down and picked it up by the scabbard.
The blade was half out of the sheath. It fell the rest of the way out, dropping onto the roadway. The mule gave it a contemptuous look, then turned her glare on the Dervish.
“Don’t look at me like that,” said the Dervish. “It won’t rust. Or dent. I wouldn’t treat any other weapon like that.” He reached down and picked up the sword, holding it far away from his body, like something foul.
Well, he certainly couldn’t leave it out on the roadway. It had been wrapped in some kind of fabric. He sawed a strip loose and wrapped it tightly around the blade, just under the guard, so that it could not fit all the way back into the scabbard. There was no sense in taking chances.
I’ll get used to it. This sword and I will be together for the rest of time, after all.
He glared at it. It was a plain blade, a bit longer than a short sword, not as long as a longsword, which presumably just made it a sword-sword.
It was rather wide at the base, but then, the Dervish had always preferred girth to length.
Heh.
But dammit, if you were going to be trapped for eternity in a blade, it could at least have interesting decorative bits.
A pommel shaped like a screaming jaguar or a crosspiece set with priceless gems. Something.
It was just so utilitarian. The Dervish had been many things in his life, but utilitarian was not one of them.
I have always considered myself highly decorative.
Maybe I can wrap the blade in gold chains or glue some gems to the scabbard. Or hire a leatherworker to make another scabbard to go around the real scabbard and do some nice decorative scrollwork on it. Hmm, yes, that’s a good idea.
The mule stamped her hoof, reminding him that he currently had bigger problems than the lack of ornamentation on his accursed sword.
Damn it all, I should get these other bodies off the road, too. Someone might see them and get ideas. The Dervish stifled a groan. Why were dead people always so much work? It took ten seconds to kill them, and then you had to spend hours mucking about with corpses afterward.
He would have liked to sit down for a bit longer and get his head together. The adrenaline of the fight had worn off and the reality of the situation was beginning to come home to him. He could have used a little time to deal with that.
I’m not ungrateful, ancestors. It’s all quite wonderful, really.
His tormentor was dead, clearly. The sword had been carried away from that house of pain.
Admittedly, he had no idea where he was or how long it had been, but even that was so much more than he had hoped for.
A very long time, it seemed, because the memory of his torment had diminished with distance, the way things sometimes did in the sword.
That, too, was something to be grateful for.
It was just that even very good things came as a shock sometimes, and it took some time to get one’s head wrapped around them.
But instead of sitting down and letting relief consume him, he had a mule and a pile of bodies to deal with.
Fine, fine. First things first. No rest for the wicked.
He slung the sword over his back and began hauling dead bodies out of the road.
The mule watched him with bright-eyed interest. Apparently her previous encounters with humans had not included dead ones being dragged around.
“And are you grateful to me for having organized this entertainment?” he asked her, as he came back for the third corpse.
“No, don’t answer that. I know the answer.
“Right,” he said, when he had pulled the bodies into the woods and tossed a few pine boughs over them. “That’s enough of that.” He looked at the mule. The mule looked back at him.
He hauled the first load of gear back to the unconscious man, who hadn’t moved. He was still alive, the Dervish knew that much. He’d have felt the man’s death as an internal snap, like a bone breaking. No sign of that yet. He went back for the second load of saddlebags.
“This would be a lot easier if you helped,” he informed the mule. The mule gazed around, clearly wondering who he was talking to.
“Worthless waste of hide,” the Dervish grumbled.
He loaded himself up with the remainder of the saddlebags and an armful of books and staggered back into the woods.
The packs caught on every twig and branch and he kept thinking someone was following him and trying to reach for his daggers, even though his hands were full.
Nerves, he thought. Just nerves. Of course you’re jumpy, this is the first time in a century that you haven’t woken up just to get vivisected.
Had it actually been a century? He could dimly sense time passing inside the blade, and had the vague impression that it had been a long time, but how long?
Given that you think ten minutes is an hour, probably about two weeks.
He snorted at himself. You can ask what year it is when you get to a town.
They’ll think you’re a bit mad, but what else is new?
He reached his temporary staging ground and dropped the rest of the packs. The ones holding books he stored away as carefully as he could. He was going to have to make some decisions about what weight he could carry, but first he wanted to sit for a minute and catch his breath.