Sword Born-Sword Dancer 5 (4 page)

Throw the dice, Tiger. Let them pick you up, put you on board a fast, sleek ship, give you food, rhuum; or run like hoolies.

I ran.

At some point, after I had stopped running, I fell asleep. Or passed out. Or something. I only woke up when a hand closed on my shoulder.

I lurched upright from the ground, then finished the movement by springing--creakily--to my feet. I had no weapon, but I could be one.

Except I didn't need to. "It's me," Del said.

So it was. Alive and in one piece. Which gave me latitude to be outraged. "Where in hoolies have you been?"

"Looking for you." She paused. "Apparently harder than you were looking for me."

"Now, wait a minute," I protested. "I didn't exactly plan to fall asleep. It was after I escaped those renegadas"--and threw up half an ocean, but I didn't tell her that--"and I figured I'd better lay low for a while, then go looking for you." I sat down again, wincing; actually, I'd been so exhausted by the fight to reach land I hadn't the strength to do anything but collapse. "Are you all right?--no. You're not." I frowned. "What did you do to yourself, bascha?"

She shifted her left arm away from me as I reached out. "It's just a scrape."

The scrape ran the length of her arm from shoulder to wrist. The elbow was particularly nasty, like a piece of offal left for scavenger birds. "Reef?"

"Reef," she confirmed. "I think we both left skin back there."

Now that she mentioned it, I was aware of the sting of salt in various cuts, scrapes, and scratches. I was stiff and sore and disinclined to move, and yet move was exactly what we needed to do. "Water," I said succinctly. "Fresh water. We need to clean off the salt, get a drink." My feet were a mess. I suspected hers were as well. "Have you seen any of the renegadas?"

"Not since I got back here in the trees and brush." Del's hair hung in salt-stiffened, drying ribbons. There was a shallow cut over one eyebrow, and her lower lip was swollen. "I don't think they ever saw me. They saw the stud, saw you ... I made like a floater in the water, hoping they'd miss me. Once they headed off after you and the captain, I got ashore."

"The captain's alive?"

"He was when I saw him." Del shaded her eyes and peered back the way I'd come.

Seaward. "We could wait until after sundown."

I gritted my teeth. "We could. Of course, I might go crazy from the salt by then."

"Or get so stiff neither of us can move," she agreed, then eyed me sidelong. "There is one cure for that, though. And now that there's room--"

I grinned. "Hoolies, bascha, you do pick the worst times to get cuddly!"

Del sniffed. "I am not 'cuddly.' I am too tall for 'cuddly.' "

I reached out and very gently touched the scrape on her arm. Del hissed and withdrew the arm sharply. "And too raw," I suggested. "Sand on top of salt? No thanks."

I moved, wished I hadn't; got my legs under me. "Which way did the stud go?"

"That way." She jerked her head to my left. "He's not exactly a boat, Tiger. He can't very well swim us to Skandi."

"But he might take us to a boat." I stood up very slowly and couldn't bite back a blurt of pain. "Ouch."

"You're all sticky," she observed. "Is that blood? Tiger--"

"I got pretty intimate with the reef. With several of them." I worked my shoulders, waggled sore fingers. "Nothing but cuts and scrapes, bascha." I put out a hand. "Come on."

Del gripped it, used it. She set her jaw against any commentary on discomfort, but I saw it well enough in the extreme stillness of her face. Like me, she was sticky with oozing blood, fluids, salt, crusted with creamy sand.

I said it for her. "Ouch."

Del was looking at me. "Your poor face."

"My face? Why?" I put a hand to it. "What's wrong with my face?"

"First the sandtiger slices grooves in one cheek, and then you get a splinter through the other."

I'd forgotten that. No wonder my cheek and mouth were sore. I fingered the wound gingerly, tongued it from inside. "Well, it's just more for the legend," I said offhandedly.

"The man who survives sandtiger attacks and shipwrecks."

Blandly, "But of course the jhihadi would."

I gifted her with a very black look.

Satisfied, Del smiled. "So, shall we hunt your misbegotten horse?"

"You mean the misbegotten horse who got me--nearly--to land, thereby saving my hide?

That horse?"

"I'm only repeating what you've called him."

"I suspect he's called us much worse."

"'Us'? I don't ride him."

"Me."

"Better." Del tucked a hank of sand-crusted hair behind an ear. "Water, or horse. Which one first?"

"Horse. He'll probably lead us to water." Rhetorically she asked, "But will he drink?" With much gritting of teeth but no verbal complaints, we moved slowly, quietly, carefully--and painfully--through the vegetation in the direction Del had seen the stud go.

THREE

FOUND the stud. We found water. We found the wherewithal to clean off as best we could, stripping out of clothes to soak away salt from both fabric and skin, shivering and muttering and hissing and swearing vilely as we discovered various gooey scrapes, cuts, and gouges, and the promise of many bruises in places too numerous to mention. I put my leather dhoti back on, but nothing else was salvageable after introductions to the reef; I was barefoot and shirtless. Del's long ivory-colored leather tunic was scoured white in places, but remained serviceable. She wasn't as battered as I because she'd been able to swim over the reef--well, over most of it--but she had some nasty scrapes on her legs, and the one down her arm.

As expected, the soles of our feet were sliced up the worst because we'd both lost our sandals; Del scrunched her face in eloquent if mute commentary as she dangled sore feet in the water.

I was out of it now, checking the stud. His fetlocks were puffing, knees oozing, chunks were missing from shoeless hooves, and he stood with his weight on three legs, not four. "All right, old man--let me see ..."

He didn't want me to. He told me so in horse language: pinned ears, swishing tail, bared teeth, an indifferent sideways snap in my general direction.

I popped him on the nose with the flat of my palm, insulting the injury, and as he stared at me, wide-eyed and aggrieved, I bent over the foreleg. "Give it here." I waited. "Give it here--"

He gave it to me eventually, if under protest.

"--hold still--" His head hung perilously near my own, but I ignored it and the quivering upper lip. "Let me just take a look ... oh, hoolies, horse! Look what you've gone and done to yourself!" No wonder he was three-legged lame; he'd sliced open the tender, recessed interior vee of the hoof, called the frog.

"What is it?" Del was squeezing out hair darkened to wheat-gold by its weight of water.

"He's cut himself. Probably on the reef. It'll heal all right, but in the meantime he's no good for riding."

"We're on an island, Tiger. There's not much to ride to."

"Or from," I muttered, carefully looking for other signs of injury in the hoof. He was undoubtedly bruised as well. And every bit as sore and weary as we were. Plus there was a lot more of him to be sore. "It's going to take days for this to heal."

"I suspect we have days," Del observed gravely. "Probably even weeks, and possibly months--" She broke off. "What's the matter?"

I didn't say anything. Couldn't.

"Tiger?"

I was bent over the hoof. I don't know if that was it, or too much fresh water on top of seawater, or just reaction to nearly drowning. But my gut decided at that moment it was not happy with its contents. Very carefully I let the hoof back down, then slowly straightened up. Almost immediately I hunched over again, palms on knees.

"What's the matter?"

"Unnngffu," I managed. Unfortunately, my belly managed something else entirely.

Del had the good grace to wait until I was done retching and swearing. Then she said, politely, "Thank you for avoiding the water hole."

I scowled at her balefully, took the two paces to the water's edge. I huddled there miserably on aching, stinging, reef-scalped knees, rinsing my mouth out and my face off.

Hands were on my head, peeling hair aside so she might inspect the skull. "You smacked it on something," she said, fingering the swelling.

"I smacked it on several somethings." The ship, the stud, the reef. "I'm probably lumpy as a bad mattress--ouch!"

She patted wet hair back into place. "This reminds me of when the stud kicked you in the head in Iskandar. Before the sword-dance. That I ended up having to dance for you."

Well, yes. The stud had indeed kicked me. In the head. In Iskandar. I'd also ended up drinking too much aqivi on top of it, thanks to a well-meaning friend, and Del had indeed danced the dance for me against Abbu Bensir, before being interrupted. But there had been more to it than that. There'd been magic.

"You know--" But I stopped short. No one knew better than I what a bladetip set against the spine feels like. "Not worth it," I told her, feeling her tense beside me. And it wasn't.

We were too stiff, too battered, too slow, in addition to being weaponless. They'd cut us down before we could even begin to turn.

Del muttered something succinct in uplander. The stud added a virulent, damply productive snort, then limped off a couple of paces.

Well, he was a horse, after all. Not a watchdog.

A big hand touched me, a rigid finger poked me--and with a garbled blurt of startlement I abruptly threw up again. Except there wasn't anything left to throw up, so all I did was heave.

Which served to amuse everyone but me. And maybe Del.

Someone cuffed me across the back of the skull, much as I cuffed the stud when he offended. "No sailor, this fool!" Amidst more laughter.

Well, no, so I wasn't. But then, I'd never claimed to be. I wobbled on my knees and one braced arm and thought very unkind and vulgar thoughts inside my abused head.

"Maybe you got stung by something," Del offered. "Something in the reef, maybe? Who knows what creatures could be lurking in those cracks and crannies. Or maybe something in the water itself."

I could think of many other things to talk about besides what was making me sick. I managed to cast her a pointed glance, then felt the meaty slap of a sword against my ribs. I winced as it connected with gnarled scar tissue. Lucky for me, it was the flat of the blade.

"Look." The same voice that had spoken earlier. "Look, fool!"

"I think you'd better," Del suggested after another blade-slap. "Look at them, I mean."

So I did, after a fashion. I sat back on my heels, let them see I was unarmed--which they probably knew already, but it never hurts to underscore such vital bits of information--then twisted my torso enough to look at them ranged behind us.

"Oh. Only six," I said, with carefully couched disdain.

"Four more than you," the closest man said, and thwapped me across the head with a broad-palmed hand as if I were an erring child.

"He's going to be sick again," Del warned as I clamped my jaws tightly. Which occasioned additional frivolity among the six renegadas.

"Maybe later," I said between gritted teeth, determined to impose self-control over an oddly recalcitrant stomach. "Hoolies, bascha--do you have to be so cursed helpful?"

"I just thought--" And then a sword lingered at her throat. Steel flashed, pale hair stirred--and a lock fell away. Nice warning, that. Sharp sword, that.

"No," someone said: a woman's voice, accented but comprehensible. "You will not distract us with foolish chatter." She paused. "Even if you are fools."

Oh, thanks.

"We are not fools," she went on.

"You should sit very still, very quietly, and pray to whatever gods and goddesses you worship that we do not lose our patience. So that you do not lose your lives."

I eyed them, marking swords, knives, stances, expressions. Six. Five men, all fairly large, all quite fit, all poised and prepared to move instantaneously. One woman, not so big--in fact, she was rather small--but every bit as armed, every bit as fit, every bit as poised, every bit as prepared.

And there was absolutely no mistaking her for anything but a woman, either. Not in those clothes. Not with that body. I blinked, impressed.

"No," the man said, and cuffed me yet again.

Three times was more than I let anyone whack me, given a choice. So I ducked, rolled, came up with one of his ankles in my hands. Twisted, yanked the leg up, avoided the off-balanced sweep of his sword, cranked the ankle back on itself and dumped him on his butt.

Of course, they stopped all that pretty quickly. Someone threw Del facedown onto the sand and sat on her, one hand knotting up her hair in a powerful grip while the other oh so casually set the knifeblade across the side of her neck; three other men landed on top of me. By the time we'd sorted all of that out, I was scummed with sand once more, and grass, and my belly was turning backflips. I discovered myself on my knees--again

--while two of the larger men gripped my wrists one-handed and yanked my arms out from my sides, blade edges balanced lightly but eagerly on sand-dusted ribs, muscle, and scar tissue now standing up in rigid washboard relief, since the renegadas had me all stretched out in the air as if I were a hide to be dried in the sun.

Del, sprawled face-down, managed to turn her head in my direction. Slowly. Carefully, so as not to invite repercussions. She spat out sand, a piece of grass. "Nice move," she commented briefly. "Forgive me if I don't thank you."

"He deserved it." I smiled benignly at the big, tanned man who sat on his rump in the sand, cursing, nursing a twisted ankle. Like the woman, he had an accent; none of the others had spoken. I noticed for the first time that he was bald, or shaved his head. Also that the head was tattooed. "And don't do it again."

He arched incredulous eyebrows. The woman burst out laughing. Like the others, she carried a sword. Like the others, she was tanned and tattered by wind, salt, and sun. Her hair, trailing down her back in a tangled half-braided tail, was a flamboyant red. The eyes beneath matching brows were hazel. And every bit of visible skin on face, arms, and legs was thickly layered in freckles.