Chapter 4 #2
Well, there was no fixing it now. He eyed his patient.
The man’s voice was a trifle deeper than the one that the Dervish had made up for him, and it made him sound older, despite his round face.
That and his eyes. His eyes looked incredibly old and incredibly weary.
The Dervish had never seen a man with eyes like that who could still blush.
“How old are you?” he asked abruptly.
“Err … twenty-seven?”
Older than the Dervish had thought. He himself was either three years or several centuries older, depending on how one measured these things.
“I’m Learn … that is…” The not-quite-so-young man rubbed his forehead. “Edmund. My name, that is.”
“Ah. I am the Dervish.”
Edmund blinked at him. “The Dervish?”
“That’s what they call me.” He wondered how the name was translating. The sword’s magic included the ability to speak the tongue of his wielder, but some words did not have exact corollaries. “A storm that spins very quickly? You know?”
“Oh. Yes. All right.” Edmund smiled and regretted it immediately, based on how his lips cracked. He sipped more of the tea.
“Does it mean something else in your tongue?”
Edmund nodded. “A religious observance. Priests who dance by spinning.”
Priests. He heard his voice go cold. “Not religious. I do not care for priests.”
“Oh,” said Edmund meekly, looking down at his tea. After a moment he said, “Thank you for saving me.”
“I had no choice.”
The words came out harsher than the Dervish intended.
His patient’s head jerked up; he looked puzzled and a little hurt.
“Uh … I’m sorry. I … uh.” He hung his head, as if it was perfectly normal to be scolded for having one’s life saved.
“I didn’t mean to … I did what the bandits asked me to?
But they attacked me anyway. I don’t know what I did wrong. ”
The Dervish’s conscience did not so much twinge as kick him in the head. “Probably nothing. Men like that get bored and turn to murder when it’s slow.”
Edmund nodded, more as if he were acknowledging that the Dervish had spoken than as if he believed the words. “You saved me,” he said again. “And set up camp here to take care of me. I’m very grateful. I know it must have been … err … inconvenient.”
You have no idea. The Dervish wondered for a moment if he could just not tell Edmund about the sword.
And then what? Then he’ll wonder why you’re hanging around him and never seem to leave.
And sooner or later he’ll put the sword back in its scabbard and then I suspect he’ll notice that you vanished into thin air.
Get it out of the way. He seems pleasant enough, not that you can ever tell.
Some wielders started out decent, then went mad with power when they learned that they had an immortal warrior at their beck and call.
Others seemed perfectly normal until, say, the aftermath of a battle, when they began casually torturing the prisoners and seemed surprised that you cared.
The Dervish had not been born cynical, but he had lost a good deal of ground since then.
He sighed. “All right,” he said. “Let me explain what’s going on…”
“My god,” said Edmund, two minutes later. “You’re a living sword!”
The Dervish considered this. “I suppose? In a manner of speaking?”
“No, no…” Edmund waved his arms, then winced and settled for a less dramatic gesture. “I mean, I’ve read about you! There was a monograph—it came into the library—everybody read it, all about living swords—”
The Dervish stiffened. If servants of the sword were widely known, that meant that people might be after him.
Unpleasant people. An immortal bodyguard was too rich a prize to pass up.
Worse, it might be someone like the last wielder, someone intelligent, who had plans far beyond merely throwing the Dervish at his enemies. Ancestors, not that. Anything but that.
“—but we all thought it was a hoax!”
The Dervish’s panicky spiral of thoughts paused. “Beg pardon?” he managed.
“A hoax,” Edmund repeated. “I mean, it sounded like one.” He coughed.
“Um, scholars do get a little odd sometimes, you know? And they get these pet theories. Just because you can write legibly and use an index doesn’t mean that you’re right, but you can certainly cough up some very impressive-sounding nonsense.
That’s what this sounded like. I mean, a whole monograph about a ghost who lived in a sword?
It was up there with Theodesius’s theory about barnacle pigeons. ”
“Barnacle … pigeons,” said the Dervish, with wonderful restraint.
“Oh yes. Well, he’d never seen a baby pigeon, had he?
So he proposed a theory that wild pigeons are amphibious and lay their eggs in the water and those hatch into barnacles—because barnacles have long necks, you see, and the shells look a bit like a beak—and then presumably when they were mature, they erupted out of the water and took their place in the air.
Of course, that’s not true,” Edmund added, apparently anxious not to spread any misinformation about the life cycle of pigeons.
“I shouldn’t imagine it was,” said the Dervish, who no longer had any sense whatsoever of where the conversation was headed.
“No, and he could have disproved it at any time simply by watching wild pigeons closely enough. But you couldn’t talk him out of it.
People showed him pigeon hatchlings in dovecotes and he said that it was a product of domestication, that they’d cut the life cycle short.
He accrued all manner of evidence. Well, he said it was evidence. ”
The Dervish rubbed his hand over his face, wondering if he should ask any follow-up questions. No. No good will come of it.
He had never been any good at resisting temptation. “And what became of this … ah … Theodesius?”
“Oh, he drowned.”
Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask … “Drowned, you say?”
“I’m afraid so.” Edmund looked genuinely sympathetic, as if the Dervish might actually be grief-stricken by the fate of a dead pigeon-enthusiast. “He tried to force the issue, you see, by holding a wild pigeon underwater until it laid eggs, and then he slipped on a rock and hit his head and drowned.”
I have no one to blame but myself for asking. “I’m afraid my sympathy is all with the pigeons here.”
“Oh, mine too. And even if he was right, he should have had someone else along as a witness, and then they could have pulled him out before he drowned. It was really very bad scholarship all around.”
The Dervish gazed at the sky, which was uniformly white with clouds. “So you thought that living swords were a hoax,” he said carefully. “Like barnacle pigeons.”
“Hoax was probably the wrong word to use,” said Edmund. “Scholarly delusion, maybe?” He paused. “Err … I mean no offense? I don’t think you’re a hoax or a delusion.”
“That’s good?” The Dervish honestly wasn’t sure if it was good or not, but had decided to just take the conversation as it came.
“I did wonder if you were a delusion at first, but I don’t think anyone has delusions this persistent. And also Sweetness sees you.”
Of all the possible beings on the earth to vouch for his existence, of course it would be the wretched mule. The Dervish slid a glance at his equine nemesis, just in time to see her lift her tail and deposit her unsolicited opinion on the ground behind her.
“So how much of it was true?” Edmund asked. “From the monograph?”
“Not having read the monograph—” What the hell is a monograph, anyway? The translation was entering his brain as “a single thought written at length” but that couldn’t be right, could it? “—I couldn’t tell you.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” Edmund put a hand to his forehead. “Sorry. I’m still not thinking straight, obviously. But you’re attached to the sword by magic, yes? If someone draws it, you come out, and if they sheathe it, you go back in again?”
“Yes,” said the Dervish. “Though I’d rather spend as little time as possible in there, if it’s all the same to you.”
Edmund blinked at him. “Does it hurt?”
“It’s a prison,” said the Dervish. “I don’t care for prisons.”
“Oh. Oh.” The young man plucked nervously at the blanket. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. That must be very hard.”
The Dervish grunted, because otherwise he was going to launch into a stream of invective that might not stop until dawn.