Var the Stick (10 page)

    Var watched incredulously as one of his sticks flew from his numbed hand, to rattle down the mountainside. The maneuver had been so swiftly and neatly executed that he had not bad the chance to defend against it. Now, half disarmed, he was virtually lost. One stick could not prevail against two.

    His inexperience in the circle had after all cost him the match. Hul would not have been caught so simply, and certainly not Tyl. Yet who would have expected such skill from a mere child?

    Var waited for the attack that had to come. He was doomed, but he would not give up. Perhaps a lunge would catch her unaware in turn, or maybe he could throw them both off the mesa, making the battle a tie in mutual death. She looked at him a moment. Then, casually, she tossed one of her own sticks after his over the brink.

    Dumbfounded, Var saw it clatter out of play. She could have tapped him on the skull in that moment without opposition, but she kept her distance.. "You"

    "So you owe me one," she said. "Fair fight." And she came at him with the single stick.

    Var had to fight, but he was-shaken. She had disarmed herself to make the match even again. When she could have had easy victory. He had never imagined such a thing in the circle.

    There was no doubt that she meant business, however. She pressed him hard with her half weapon, and scored repeatedly on his unarmed side. It was a strange, off balance contest, requiring unusual contortions and reflexes to compensate for the missing stick, and the finesse of the dual weapons was largely gone.

    Thus, clumsily, they fought. And Var, because the reduction of finesse brought her skill closer to his own level without correspondingly upgrading her strength, gradually gained the initiative. But he pursued it with restraint, for he did not need a second such lesson as the one that had cost him one stick. The child was most dangerous when she seemed most beleaguered. And he still wasn't certain what her sacrifice of her own stick meant. Surely she could not have been so confident of victory that she disarmed herself for the joy of enhanced competition! And surely she could not desire to lose....

    Var had not survived his childhood in the badlands without being alert to the dangers of the unknown. Not all unknowns were physical.

    She was tiring, and he slacked off some more, supercautious. The height of the sun showed they had been at it for some three hours, and now the afternoon was passing.

    But how would it end, with their life-and-death battle reduced to mere sparring. Only one of them could descend the mountainside. Only one team could prevail. Delay could not change that harsh reality.

    If the contest did not end soon, the victor would not have enough time remaining before dusk to make a safe descent. Mt. Muse was challenging at any time, and seemed impossible in the dark. -

    It did not end soon. The battle had become a mockery, for neither person was really trying to win. Not immediately, anyway. Both were holding back, conserving strength, waiting for some more crucial move by the other that did not come. Stick still beat against stick; but the force was perfunctory, the motions routine.

    Dusk did come. The girl stepped back, dropping her weapon. "We shouldn't fight at night," she said.

    Var lowered his own weapon, agreeing, but alert for betriyal.

    She walked to the edge, leaving her stick behind. "Don't look," she said. She squatted.

    Var realized that she had to urinate. But if he turned his back she could run up behind him and push. Still, if he could not trust her during this period of truce, he had had no business agreeing to it. And there had been that matter of the extra stick. Her codes were different than his, but they seemed consistent.

    He faced outward and relieved his own bladder into the gloom below.

    Their toilets done, the two returned to the center of the plateau. Darkness filled the landscape like a great ocean, but their island remained clear. And lonely.

    "I'm hungry," she said.

    So was he. But there was nothing to eat. All concerned had assumed that the battle would be of short duration, so no provision for a prolonged stay had been made.

    Perhaps this had been intentional: if the champions did not fight with sufficient vigor, thirst and hunger would prompt them.

    "You don't talk much, do you," she said.

    "I don't talk well," Var explained. The mangled syllables conveyed the message more clearly than the language did.

    Oddly, she smiled, a flash of white in shadow. "My father doesn't talk at all. He got hurt in the throat, years ago. Before I can remember. But I understand him well enough."

    Var just nodded.

    "Why don't you take that side, and I'll take this side, and we'll sleep," she said, gesturing. "Tomorrow we'll finish this."

    He agreed. He took his stick and skuffed it across the center of the plateau, making a line that divided the area in halves. He lay down in his territory.

    The girl sat up for a while, looking very small. "What is your name?"

    "Var."

    "Growr?

    "Var."

    "I don't see any bad scar on your throat. Why can't you talk?"

    Var tried to figure out a simple way to answer that, but failed.

    "What's it like, outside?" she asked.

    He realized that he did not need to reply sensibly to her questions. She was more interested in talking than in listening.

    "It's cold," she said.

    Var hadn't thought about it, but she was right. A hard chill was settling on the mesa, and they were both naked and without sleeping bags. He could endure it, of course; he had slept exposed many times in youth. But she was smaller then be, and thinner, and her skin was soft.

    In fact, the cold would be more than an inconvenience to her. She could die from exposure. Already her hunched hairless torso was shaking so violently he felt the tremors in the ground.

    Var sat up. "That favour I owe you, for the stick" he called.

    Her head turned toward him. He could see the motion, but nothing else in the fading light. "I don't understand."

    "For the stick my return favor." He tried to enunciate clearly.

    "Stick," she said. "Favor." She was beginning to pick up his clumsy words, but not his meaning. Her teeth chattered as she spoke.

    "The warmth of my body, tonight."

    "Warm? Night?" She remained perplexed.

    Var got up abruptly and crossed over to her. He lay down on his side, took hold of her, and pulled her to him. "Sleep warm," he said as clearly as he could.

    For a moment her body was tense, and her hands flew to his neck in a gesture he recognized from demonstrations the Nameless One had made. She knew weaponless combat! Then she relaxed.

    "Oh you mean to share warmth! Oh, thank you, Val"

    And she turned about, curled up, and lay with her shivering back nestled against his front, his arms and legs falling about her. His chin, sprouting its sparse beard, came to nestle in her fluffy hair. His forearm settled on her folded thigh, his hand clasped her knee to gain the purchase necessary to keep them close together.

    Var remembered the first time he had held a woman, not so many months before. But of course this was not the same. Sola had been buxom and hot, while this child was bony and cold. And the relationship was entirely different.

    Yet he found this chaste camaraderie against the cold to be as meaningful as that prior sexual connection. To stand even on the favors that was part of the circle code, as he understood it, and there was no shame in it.

    Yet in the morning they would do battle again.

    "Who are you?" he asked now. For once the words came out succinctly.

    "Soil. My father is sol of all weapons."

    Sol of All Weapons! The former master of the empire, and the man who had built it up from nothing. No wonder she was so proficient!

    Then a terrible thought struck him. "Your mother, who is your mother?"

    "Oh, my mother knows even more about fighting than Sol does but she does it without weapons. She's very small hardly bigger than I am, and I'm not full grown but any man who comes at her lands on his head!" She tittered. "It's funny."

    Relief, until something else occurred to him. "She your mother brown curly hair, very good figure, smock"

    "Yes, that's her! But how could you know? She's never been out of the underworld not since I've been there."

    Once again Var found himself at a loss to explain. Certainly he did not want to tell her he had tried to kill her mother.

    "Of course Sosa isn't my natural mother," Soil remarked. "I was born outside. My father brought me in, when I was small."

    Var's earlier shock returned. "You're you're Sola's dead daughter?"

    "Well, we're not really dead in the underworld. We just let the nomads think that, because I don't know exactly why. Sol was married to Sola outside, though, and I'm their child. They say Sola married the Nameless One, after that."

    "Yes. But she kept her name."

    "Sosa kept her name, too. That's funny."

    But Var was remembering Sola's charge to him: "Kill the man who harms my child."

    Var the Stick was that man, for he was pledged to save the empire by killing the mountain's champion.

CHAPTER TEN

Var woke several times in the night, beset by the chill of this height. A wind came up, wringing the precious warmth from his back. Only in front, where he touched Soli, was he warm. He could have survived alone but it was better this way.

    Every so often the girl stirred but when her limbs stretched out and met the cold, they contracted again quickly. Even so, her hands were icy. Had she slept by herself she would hardly have been able to wield a stick in the morning. Var put his coarse hand over her fine one, shielding it.

    Dawn finally came. They stood up shivering and jumped vigorously to restore circulation, and attended to natural calls again, but it was some time before they both felt better. Fog shrouded the plateau, making the drop off unreal, the sky dismal.

    "What's that?" Soli inquired, pointing.

    Once more, Var was at a loss to answer. He knew what it was, but not what women called it.

    "My father Sol doesn't have one," she said.

    Var knew she was mistaken, for had that been the case, she herself would never have been born.

    "I'm hungry," she said. "And thirsty too."

    So was Var but they were no closer to a solution to that problem than they had been the night before. They had to fight. The winner would descend and feast as royally as he or she wished. The other would not need food again, ever. He looked at the two singlesticks lying across the centerline. A pair but one his, the other hers.

    She saw his glance. "Do we have to fight?"

    Var never seemed to be able to answer her questions. On the one hand he represented the empire; on the other he had his oath to Sola to uphold. He shrugged.

    "It's foggy," she said wistfully. "Nobody can see us."

    Meaning that they should not fight without witnesses? Well, it would do for an excuse. The mist showed no sign of dissipating, and no sound rose from its depths. The world was a whiteness, as was their contest.

    "Why don't we go down and get some food?" she asked. "And come back before they see us."

    The simplicity and directness of her mind were astonishing! Yet why not? He was glad to have a pretext to postpone hostilities, since he could not see his way clear either to winning or losing.

    "Truce until the fog lifts?" he asked.

    "Truce until the fog lifts. That time I understood you very well."

    And Var was pleased.

    They descended on Var's side of the mountain, after retrieving the stick harnesses. The third and fourth sticks themselves had bounced and rolled and been lost entirely, but the harnesses had stayed where they fell. Soli had feared that the underworld had ways to spot anyone who traversed her own slope of Mt. Muse. "Television pickups can't tell where they're hidden."

    "You mean sets are just sitting around outside?" Var knew what television was; he had seen the strange silent pictures on the boxes in hostels.

    "Sets outside," she repeated, Interpreting. "No, silly. Pickups little boxes like eyes, set into stones and things, operated by remote controL"

    Var let the subject drop. He had never seen a stone with an eye in it, but there had been stranger things in the badlands.

    The fog was even thicker at the base. They held hands and sneaked up to the Master's camp. Then Var hesitated. "They'll know me," he whispered.

    "Oh." She was taken aback. "Could I go in, then?"

    "You don't know the layout."

    "I'm hungry!" she wailed.

    "Sh.." He jerked her back out of auditory range. A warrior sentry could come on them at any time.

    "Tell me the layout," she whispered desperately. "I'll go in and steal some food for us."

    "Stealing isn't honest!"

    "It's all right in war. From an enemy camp."

    "But that's my camp!"

    "Oh." She thought a moment. "I could still go. And ask for some. They don't know me."

    "Without any clothes?"

    "But I'm hungry!"

    Var was getting disgusted, and didn't answer. His own hunger became intense.

    She began to cry.

    "Here," Var said, feeling painfully guilty. "The hostel has clothes."

    They ran to the hostel, one mile. Before Var could protest, Soli handed him her harness and stick and walked inside. She emerged a few minutes later wearing a junior smock and a hair ribbon and new sandals, looking clean and fresh.

    "You're lucky no one was there!" Var said, exasperated. "Someone was there. Somebody's wife, waiting to meet her warrior. I guess they're keeping the women out of your main camp. She jumped a mile when I walked in. I told her I was lost, and she helped me."