Beneath an Opal Moon, page 3
part #4 of Sunset Warrior Cycle Series
“How did you get that’?” he said, indicating the messenger’s large bruise.
The young man touched the tender spot unconsciously with the tips of his fingers. “Oh, combat practice with the Regent. You know, he never misses a day and he is an outstanding warrior even even now.” He looked away from Moichi, embarrassed by his blunder.
Just then Moichi felt a shift in the kubaru’s gait and he leaned out of the ricksha. There was a disturbance in the street ahead and the runner was slowing. They were out of the port quarter now and into an area swarming with shops of a bewildering variety a sort of permanent bazaar.
A cluster of people was blocking the street, Moichi saw, and their kubaru was turning his head, searching for an alternate route to the Seifu-ke. But before he could turn them around, three Greens separated themselves from the pack and swag gered up to the ricksha. They were all heavyset men with greasy black hair tied back in queues. They were dressed in black cotton tunics and wide pants. Short-hafted axes hung at their sides.
Moichi was on the point of asking them to help clear the way when he saw one of the Greens scowl and, grasping his ax, fling it, whirring, into the carriage. It crashed into the chestof the messenger with such force that, as his breastbone shattered, he was propelled partway through the ricksha’s reed back. The young man had not even had enough time to realize that they were under attack.
As blood spurted, Moichi jumped clear of the carriage, keeping the small reed structure between his rolling body and the oncoming Greens.
Time seemed to leap forward as the period of shock passed and movement began all over. People were running in every direction, screaming, and this helped somewhat. But the Greens were quartering, two, then three as the squat man who had thrown the ax leapt up into the carriage and jerked his weapon from the messenger’s corpse.
Moichi had one dirk out, the point lifted slightly higher than the heft, crouched in the attacker’s pose.
He ran from them and they laughed as if they had encountered a frightened child instead of a warrior and they fanned out in a wedge-shaped path. In a moment, he had whirled, one of the Greens almost upon him, and, reversing the dirk, threw it, heavy hilt first, directly into the onrushing man’s face.
The Green screamed and reeled backward from the enormous force of the blow. Blood gushed from his broken nose and he tried to spit out shattered teeth through his torn and ruined lips. At the same time, Moichi was whipping out his second dirk, rolling into the man. He slashed once as he went by, cutting the Green’s Achilles tendon. He picked up the Green’s fallen ax and hurled it without having time for a proper aim, using his peripheral vision from whence he had seen the blu red movement heading toward him.
The airborne ax glanced off the second Green’s kneecap. It hit him flat on and the man grunted as his leg buckled at the joint. But he knew how to fall, rolling, and he came up the angle had been wrong and thus the knee was merely bruised, not broken as Moichi had intended. He let fly his own ax.
Moichi ducked and splinters of brick and mortar sailed at him, filling the air as the weapon crashed into a building wall just beside his head.
The Green was close enough now and Moichi lashed out with his right leg, feeling his arch make contact with the man’s cheekbone at the precise angle. Bones splintered and the Green moaned, toppling over. His tongue came out, red and sticky, almost torn in two by his own teeth. But he was far from through. He bounced off the wall, hurled himself at Moichi,using his massive arms in a smashing blow against the navigator’s shoulder. The dirk flew from Moichi’s grasp and the Green’s fingers went for the throat, the nails long and deadly.
Moichi let the hands in, looped his own around them, slamming his balled fists into the other’s ears with such force that blood immediately sprayed out as the eardrums ruptured. The Green rose up, bellowing with pain, and Moichi brought his massive hands together, breaking his neck.
Rolling the bloody body off him he rose, watching the third Green approach. He was the squat man and he circled Moichi with some caution. His ax blade shimmered crimson in the sunlight.
Moichi, keeping the splintered brickwork of the wall at his back, drew his silver-hilled sword. “Why did you kill him?” he said thickly. ”We meant you no harm.”
“Meant us no harm?” spat the Green. “He was a Red, wasn’t he?”
For an instant, Moichi felt disoriented, almost as if he had somehow slipped backward into time, into the Sha’angh’sei before the advent of the Kai-feng. “What are you saying?” he breathed. “The Reds and the Greens are at peace.”
The squat man hawked and a gob of phlegm spattered at Moichi’s feet. “No more, by the gods. No more! That illomened truce is thankfully at an end.” He brandished his ax menacingly. “It was unnatural. We all felt ashamed. As unclean as defilers of little boys. By the great god of Sha’angh’sei, Kay-lro De, war is returned to the streets of the city!”
He rushed at Moichi then and they fought close together for long moments, breathlessly thrusting and counterthrusting, each seeking a weakness in the other’s defence.
Moichi shifted his sword to his left hand and in the same motion swung it at the squat man in a flashing flat arc. Thus occupied, the other failed to see Moichi’s right hand in time, fingers extended and rigid as a board. He turned, far too late. Moichi’s hand, edge first, plowed into the nerve cluster at the side of his neck and the Green crashed heavily to the cobbles.
The street was deserted now, save for the strewn bodies; the kubaru had long since disappeared. But Moichi could feel the eyes staring at him from the many shop windows. Taking deep breaths, ignoring the fire in his left shoulder, he hastily retrieved his dirks, shoving them into his wide sash. Returning his sword to its tattooed leather scabbard, he turned down a side street, disappearing almost immediately from view.
“What I do not understand is what set it off.”
“That is one of the reasons for your hasty summons.”
“You know?”
”Yes. “
“Tell me, then.”
“I am afraid that it is not a simple matter. Not simple at all. “
Moichi sat in a room on the second floor of the Seifu-ke. Through the large leaded-glass windows which were open now to catch any hint of a sea breeze, he saw the thick verdant trees lining Okan Road still as a painting above the nearby slanting rooftops.
Months before, after the ending of the Kai-feng, they had cleared away the old palace of the Empress, levering its grandiose sleeping quarters and its vast work chambers, its cold marble columns and long echoing halls. Not because of any disrespect to the fallen Empress; the monument in Jihi Square was more than proof of that. The palace, like its hereditary occupant, simply belonged to another era. In its place had been constructed a three-story dwelling smaller and more functional of rough oxidized brick relieved by glossy platinum fillwork at the interstices and edges. This singular combination of the grittily stark and the softly sensual gave the new Regent’s home a look of having been in the center of Sha’angh’sei’s tumult forever. This was the Seifu-ke.
Across a dark, highly polished sandalwood table, rikkagin Aerent, the first Regent of Sha’angh’sei, sat in a highbacked chair of carved ebony. He was a tall, lean man with wide, powerful shoulders, thick Braying hair and close-cropped beard. His face was the color of lightly cured leather, seamed beyond his years. It was dominated by a curving hawk-like nose and dark eyes which could easily have been brooding but weren’t. They were, instead, constantly full of light and life.
Just the opposite of his dead brother, Moichi thought, who had been doom-filled, tortured by his own inner nature. Looking into those eyes of Aerent’s, one saw the rikkagin, the superb military leader, yes, but one saw much more. There was absolutely no opacity there; they were clear and so deep that they seemed to go on forever. And at the core, what did one see? More than a warrior; more than a commander of men. A man. It was Aerent’s deep and abiding humanity which, in the end, made him so extraordinary, Moichi thought. And Tuolin, hisbrother? His only family. Moichi shrugged inwardly. War. It was such utter madness. Was it luck that had allowed him and Aerent to survive while Tuolin was slain? Or was there some great force, unknowable to man, which guided the ultimate outcome of events? He shrugged again.
“It was like a return to the old days, Aerent,” Moichi said. “The hate is there still, even though none of them could say why or how it all began.”
Aerent nodded. “Yes. Now it has begun again and it is as if the truce never happened. They have short memories for some things, the Ching Pang and the Hung Pang.”
“But how did it happen? Some skirmish between parties of the two?”
The Regent smiled ruefully. “If only it were that simple, there might be some hope at least. But as it is ” He shrugged. “What has happened,” he said deliberately, putting his hands flat on the table, “is that Du-Sing’s youngest son was found murdered late last night.”
“Son of the tai-pan of the Greens!” Moichi whistled low in his throat.
“And that is not all.” Aerent’s heavily muscled arms straightened as he put weight on them, into his hands, levering himself up. He stood weaving slightly for a moment until he was quite sure of his balance. Then he walked, stiff-legged, somewhat awkwardly for the first several steps, out from behind the barrier of the table, crossing the room.
Moichi would not be abysmally rude as to turn his gaze aside, yet perhaps the sight of his friend walking compelled him to say: “I am truly sorry, Aerent. About that young man “
The Regent lifted a hand.
“You did more than could be expected, Moichi. He was a good lad.” He turned and smiled. “I thank the gods you are all right. I still think I should call a physician to take a look at that shoulder “
Now it was the navigator’s turn to raise his hand.
“At least use some of this ice,” the Regent said, pushing a bowl across the table. Moichi acquiesced. The cold would stop the swelling and it damped the ache, at least for the time being.
Moichi watched his friend as he made his careful way across the room to the window. He looks more like an enormous insect, Moichi thought. A praying mantis perhaps, locked within the peculiarly articulated mode of locomotion devisedfor him. At length, the Regent made the window and sat down on the wide sill, his long legs stretched out before him. He put a long hand out, feeling their gem hardness, saying: “It’s gotten so I hate to hide them now.”
“I imagine it is not something one can easily get used to.”
“Indeed, no.” Aerent smiled thinly and thought, Still, luckier than some. Thank the gods I at least, was spared the grief of soul which plagued Tuolin. Strange that only at the point of death should he find love. He was a warrior to the last. And, at the end, a true hero. Thus shall he be remembered. It is only just.
He sat straight as a ramrod, looking inward while Moichi waited without, patiently thinking his own thoughts. Aerent felt the soft wind that sprang up, drying the sweat on his back, which had caused his green silk shirt to cling clammily to his skin. Then the sun had dimmed behind him as the quickforming summer thunderheads built up on the southwest quarter, racing hastily inland as if late for some important assignation. He sniffed once: the incipience of rain. It recalled to him, like a flash of lightning, that sleeting morning, racing across the battlefield before the yellow stone citadel of Kamado, his sleek stallion thundering under him with such coordinated power and the fusillade he avoided by a mere hairsbreadth by rolling from his saddle. But the ground was treacherous, made slippery by the blood and gore of many, so that the earth itself was hidden by the grisly mattress of the piled bodies. His mount had stumbled and panicked and, as it had swerved hysterically, his booted foot caught the edge of the metal stirrup, twisted sideways, an inescapable trap. He had been dragged across the humped ground, over bodies and fallen weapons, a hideous and lethal gauntlet. Armor had protected most of his torso and arms; at the very end, something had sheared away half his helmet so that he had mercifully passed into unconsciousness.
But there was nothing any physician could do about his legs. The nerves were gone and in any case the damage to flesh and muscle was so extensive that they had had no choice. They had left it to Tuolin’s physician to tell him.
Still, he did not despair for he had no room in his bright soul for that bleak, immobilising emotion. There is something good in everything that happens, Aerent had thought, or, at the very least, something important to be learned. His body had been tested and he had come through. Now his mind wasbeing put to the task. Here he would either survive or perish emotionally.
The physicians being useless to him once they had cut the dead flesh away, he called for the engineers, dismissing at once those who could not keep from smiling and who averted their eyes or who seemed bewildered by his summons, for those were invariably the ones who told him that nothing could be done.
Aerent did not believe this and, at length, he found a man who was both unafraid and who knew what would be required. “They should, I feel, be more than functional,” were the first words out of his mouth, and Aerent had been satisfied. “Do it,” he had said.
Money was no problem, of course. Aerent was a hero of the Kai-feng and already a ground-swell movement was forming for his appointment as first Regent of Sha’angh’sei. The city, in effect, had taken his legs from him; thus the city would restore them to him no matter the cost.
The engineer he was the same man who had drawn up the plans for the Seifu-ke had worked ceaselessly for a full season, abandoning all other projects, and, at last, he came to Aerent with a long thin package perhaps a meter long wrapped in dark cloth.
“It is done,” he said, laying open the contents.
They were fashioned after the human skeletal leg structure, the arcing bones carved from a ruby-like substance that had all the tensile strength of the gem but also had the required flexibility. The joints were masterpieces of construction, gimbals and sockets of onyx and solid brass brushed with a dry lubricant which also protected the metal from moisture and day-to-day wear.
It took half a day to fit the legs but, then, Aerent would never have to take them off. As he worked on the last adjustments, the engineer had said, “Of course we have many substances to mold over these ‘bones’ so that the legs will seem almost real. But” he tightened the last screw and stood up, admiring his handiwork “to be quite frank I prefer them as they are. It is what I would do if I were wearing them. “
Aerent had gazed at them for a long time, searching perhaps for some emotion deep inside himself, some guide. “Yes,” he said at length. “I believe you are quite correct. Let us leave them as they are.” He put his hands on the ruby bones, his fingers feeling along their lengths. Then, with the aid of a chairback, he stood up for the first time and, strangely, the immediate sensation was one of enormous freedom. It was not until much later that he realized how much lighter his new legs were compared to the ones of flesh and real bone.
The rain had begun. Aerent’s spine arched involuntarily as the first drops pattered against his back. The sky above Sha’angh’sei was dark and rippling like a great beast’s underbelly. Thunder rolled distantly.
“It was all right then, after that,” the Regent said.
Moichi had to think for a moment. ”Yes. I knew which streets to avoid.”
Aerent nodded. “Good. Those idiots!” He meant the Greens who had attacked Moichi and the messenger. “Omejiru, DuSing’s son, was found in a room on the second floor of a tavern on Green Dolphin Street.”
“Which one?”
“The Screaming Monkey, I am told.”
“Not the most savvy of inns. Have you been there yet?”
“No. I deemed it prudent to wait until morning. Nothing has been touched.”
“You’ve seen the body?”
“Yes. It was brought here. Du-Sing picked it up some time later. “
“How was the young man killed?”
“With great efficiency, I am afraid. It was no street brawl.”
“Hardly accidental, then.”
“No. The sword strokes were as brutal as they were efficacious. He was murdered by an expert.”
“Murdered?”
“His sword was still in his scabbard. I ascertained subsequently, that it had not been used.”
“I see. But why does Du-Sing suspect the Reds?”
“It comes down, I think, to the places Omojiru frequented. It was rumored that he was the black sheep of the family but the old man ignored this as much as he was able. Still, it is fairly well known that the lad used the gambling houses in the Tejira Quarter.”
“Territory of the Hung Pang.”
The Regent nodded soberly. “And then there were the girls. It is said that Omojiru had a voracious appetite for girls. Four and five a night. None, they tell me, over the age of twelve.” His arms like corded steel and he was up again, springing lightly across the room far more quickly than any normal man couldmanage it, the mantis afoot. “Omojiru, it can be readily seen, was far from a source of pride to Du-Sing. Still, he was family and, of course, a Green. All other distinctions have been made irrelevant by death.”
Moichi looked into his friend’s eyes. “I do not think that it matters to Du-Sing whether or not the Reds actually killed his son.”
“In that you are wrong, Moichi,” the Regent said. “But I see your point. The war between the Greens and the Reds is an inevitable course in Sha’angh’sei. I see that clearly now. No truce could hold for long. This city must find its own course. Not one man or one woman, nor even a group of people, can impose their ultimate will here. Even Kiri knew that, did not attempt to cross certain natural barriers, and she was a hereditary ruler, an extraordinary individual. I doubt that anyone else could have united the Greens and Reds for the Kai-feng.
