Duncan, Dave - The Seventh Sword - 2 - The Coming Of Wisdom

VIP免费
2024-12-03 0 0 577.3KB 184 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Dave%20Duncan%20-%2...Seventh%20Sword%20-%2002%20-%20The%20Coming%20Of%20Wisdom.txt
The Fourth Oath
Fortunate is he who saves the life of a colleague, and greatly blessed are two
who have saved each other's. To them only is permitted this oath and it shall be
paramount, absolute, and irrevocable:
I am your brother, My life is your life, Your joy is my joy, My honor is your
honor, Your anger is my anger, My friends are your friends, Your enemies are my
enemies, My secrets are your secrets, Your oaths are my oaths, My goods are your
goods, You are my brother.
BOOK ONE:
HOW THE SWORDSMAN RAN AWAY
t
"Quili! Wake up! Priestess!"
Whoever was shouting was also banging on the outer door. Quili rolled over and
buried her head under the blanket. Surely she had just come to bed?
The outer door squeaked. The banging came again, now on the planks of the inner
door, nearer and much louder.
"Apprentice Quili! You must come!" More banging.
The trouble with summer was that there was never enough night for sleeping, yet
the little room was still quite black. The roosters had not started yet... No,
there was one, far away ... She would have to waken. Someone must be sick or
dying.
Then the inner door squealed open, and a man was waving a rush light and
shouting. "Priestess! You must come—there are swordsmen, Quili!"
"Swordsmen?" Quili sat up.
Salimono was a roughhewn, lumbering man, a fanner of the Third. Normally
imperturbably placid, he was capable on rare occasions of becoming as flustered
as a child. Now one of his great hands was waving the sparking rush light all
around, threatening to set fire to his own silver hair, or Quili's straw
mattress, or the ancient shingles of the roof. It scrolled brilliance in the
dark. It flickered on stone walls, and on his haggard face, and in Quili's eyes.
"Swordsmen. .. coming ... Oh! Beg pardon, priestess!" He
1
2 THE COMING OF WISDOM
turned around quickly, just as Quili fetl back and pulled the blanket up to her
chin.
"Sal'o, you did say 'swordsmen'?"
"Yes, priestess. In a boat. By the jetty. Piliphanto saw them. You hurry,
Quili..." He headed for the door.
"Wait!"
Quili wished she could take off her head, shake it, and put it back on again.
She had walked away most of the night with Agol's baby, surely the worst case of
colic in the history of the People.
Swordsmen? The rush light was filling the tiny room with fumes of goose grease.
Piliphanto was not a total idiot. No thinker, but no idiot. He was a keen
fisherman, which could explain why he had been down on the jetty before dawn.
There would be more light down by the water, and a swordsman's silhouette would
be distinctive. It was possible.
"What are you doing about them?"
Standing in the doorway with his back firmly turned, Sali-mono said, '.'Getting
the women out, of course!"
"What! Why?"
"Ach! Swordsmen."
That was wrong. That was all wrong. Quili knew little about swordsmen, but she
knew more about them than Sal'o did. Hiding the women would be the absolute
worst thing to do.
"You mustn't! It'll be an insult! They'll be furious!"
"But, priestess..."
She was not a priestess. She was only a Second, an apprentice. The tenants
called her priestess as a courtesy because she was all they had, but she was
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/D...-%2002%20-%20The%20Coming%20Of%20Wisdom.txt (1 of 184) [10/15/2004 2:29:07 PM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Dave%20Duncan%20-%2...Seventh%20Sword%20-%2002%20-%20The%20Coming%20Of%20Wisdom.txt
only seventeen and Sal'o was a farmer of the Third and a grandfather and
Motipodi's deputy, so she could not possibly give him orders, but she was also
the local expert on swordsmen, and she knew that hiding the women would be a
terrible provocation... She needed time to think.
"Wait outside! Don't let the women leave. I'll be right there."
"Yes, Quili," Sal'o said, and the room was dark. Plumes of phantom light still
floated on blackness in her eyes. The outer door banged, and she heard him
shouting.
DAVE DUNCAN 3
Quili threw off the blanket and shivered herself a coating of goose bumps. The
flags were icy and uneven as she padded across to the window and threw open the
shutter. A faint glow entered, accompanied by a hiss of rain and dripping sounds
from the roof.
One of her two gowns was muddy, for yesterday she had been thinning the carrots.
Her other was almost as shabby, yet somewhere she still had an old one she had
brought from the temple. It had been her second best then and was better than
her other two now—gardening ruined clothes much faster than being an acolyte
did. She found it in the chest, yanked it out, and pulled it over her head in
one long, shivery movement. It was surprisingly tight. She must have filled out
more than she had thought. What would swordsmen think of a priestess who wore a
tight-fitting gown like this? She fumbled for her shoes and a comb at the same
time.
Her wooden soles clacked on the paving. She opened the squeaky outer door even
as she reached for her cloak, hanging on a peg beside it. The bottom edge of the
sky was brightening below a carpet of black cloud. More roosters screamed
welcome to the dawn. She was still dragging the comb through her long tangles;
her eyes felt puffy and her mouth dry.
On the far side of the pond, four or five of the smoky rush lights hissed amid a
crowd of a dozen adults and some frightened children. Two or three more people
were heading toward mem. Light reflected fuzzily in the rain-pebbled water;
other lights danced in a couple of windows. There was no wind, only steady,
relentless drizzle; summer rain, not even very cold.
She splashed along the trail, around the pond to the group. Rain soaked her hair
and dribbled into her collar. Silence fell at her approach. She was the local
expert on swordsmen.
Why would swordsmen be coming here?
Several voices started to speak, but Salimono's drowned them out. "Is it safe,
priestess?"
"It isn't safe to hide the women!" Quili said firmly. Kandoru had told stories
about deserted villages being burned. "You'd provoke them. No, it's the men!"
"But they didn't do it!" a woman wailed.
"It wasn't us!" said others. "You know that!"
4 THE COMING OF WISDOM
"Hush!" she said, and they hushed. They were all older than she, even Nia, and
yet they hushed. They were alt bigger than she—husky, raw peasant folk, gentle
and bewildered and indistinct in the gloom. "SaTo, did you send a message to her
ladyship'1"
"PiPowent."
"I think maybe all the men should go..."
There was another terrified chorus of "We didn't do it!"
"Quiet! I know that. I'll testify to that. But I don't think it was reported."
There was a silence. Then Myi's voice growled, "How could it be reported?"
There had been no swordsmen left to report it to.
Would that matter? Quili did not know.
When an assassination went unreported, was it all the witnesses who were equally
guilty, or was there some other, even more horrible formula? Either way, she was
sure that the men were in danger. Swordsmen rarely killed women.
"I'll go and greet them. They won't hurt me." Quili spoke with as much
confidence as she could manage. The priesthood was sacrosanct, wasn't it? "But I
mink you men should all go off wood 'cutting or something until we know why
they've come. Women get food ready. They'll want breakfast. They may go straight
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/D...-%2002%20-%20The%20Coming%20Of%20Wisdom.txt (2 of 184) [10/15/2004 2:29:07 PM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Dave%20Duncan%20-%2...Seventh%20Sword%20-%2002%20-%20The%20Coming%20Of%20Wisdom.txt
on to the manor, but well try to keep them here as long as we can, if there
aren't too many... How many of them are there, Sal'o?"
"Don't know."
"Mfell, go and tell Adept Motipodi. Wood cutting, or land clearing up on the
hill until we find out what they want. Arrange signals. Now, off you go!"
All the men ran. Quili huddled her cloak about her. "Myi? Prepare some food.
Meat, if you can find any. And beer."
"What if they ask where the men are?"
'Tell lies," Quili said. This was a priestess speaking?
"What if they want us to... to go to bed?" That was Nia, and her man Hantula was
almost as old as Kandoru had been.
Quili laughed, surprising herself. She was having nightmares of bodies and blood
all over the ground, and Nia was
DAVE DUNCAN 5
dreaming of a tussle with some handsome young swordsman. "Do it, if you want to!
Enjoy yourself!"
Incredulously Nona said, "A married woman? It's all right?"
Quili paused to drag up memories of lessons in the temple. But she was sure.
"Yes. It's quite all right. Not any swordsman, but with a free sword it's all
right. He is on the service of the Goddess and deserves all our hospitality."
Kandoru had always said that it was a great honor for a woman to be chosen by a
free, but when Quili had known him he had been no longer a free sword. He had
been a resident swordsman, limited to one woman, limited by age; limited also by
failing health, although sometimes he had sounded as if that had been her fault.
"Kol'o won't like it," Nona muttered. She had not been married long.
"He should," Quili said. "If you have a baby within a year, it can have a
swordsman fathermark." She heard them all hiss with sudden excitement. She was a
city girl and expected to know all these things. She was also their priestess;
if she said it was all right, then it would be all right. Swordsmen never raped,
Random had insisted. They never had to.
"Really? A whole year? How soon?"
Quili did not know, but she glanced up at Nona's face. The flicker from the
dying rush lights was too blurred to show expression. If she were pregnant, men
that wasn't showing, either. "Hold on to it for a couple of weeks, and I'll
testify to the facemarker for you."
Nona blushed, and that did show, and the others laughed. They had little to give
their children, these humble folk. A swordsman fathermark would be worth more
man much gold. To a girl it would mean a high brideprice. To a boy, if he were
nimble, a chance for admission to the craft. Even a young husband would swallow
his pride for those and talk of being honored, whatever he truly felt. The laugh
broke the tension. Good! Now they would not flee in terror or unwittingly
provoke violence.
But Quili had to go and meet the swordsmen. She shivered and clutched her cloak
tighter yet. Suddenly she realized that
6 THE COMING OF WISDOM
she had met only one swordsman in her whole life—Kandoni, her murdered husband.
The rain might be faltering. Dawn was certainly close, the^ eastern sky
brightening. The roosters were in blatant competition now. Leaving the
twittering women, Quili splashed off along the road. One way led to the manor,
the other to the River and the jetty. Beyond Salimono's house and the dam, the
track dropped swiftly into a little gorge, and into darkness.
She went slowly, hearing the slap of her shoes in puddles, trying not to imagine
herself tumbling into the stream and arriving at the jetty all covered in mud.
Going to meet swordsmen ... She should have brought one of the rush lights.
Why would swordsmen be coming here?
They might be coming by chance, but few ships or boats came downstream, because
southward lay the Black Lands— rough water and no inhabitants. It was even less
likely that swordsmen would have come upstream, from the north, for that way lay
Ov.
They might be coming to avenge Kandoni. Swordsmen were utterly merciless against
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/D...-%2002%20-%20The%20Coming%20Of%20Wisdom.txt (3 of 184) [10/15/2004 2:29:07 PM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Dave%20Duncan%20-%2...Seventh%20Sword%20-%2002%20-%20The%20Coming%20Of%20Wisdom.txt
assassins, swordsmen killers. Kandoni had told her so, many times. She would
have to convince them that they were looking in the wrong place. A priest or
priestess must never tell a lie and was therefore a favored witness, even if she
had been his wife and not disinterested. And there were a dozen others. The
killers had come from Ov.
But the assassination had not been reported—or at least, she did not think it
had been. She did not need to repeat the code of the priesthood to know mat
prevent bloodshed came very high on her list of duties to the Goddess.
A pebble rolled under her foot, and she stumbled. Even in daylight this bend of
the gorge was a tunnel, confined between steep walls and overshadowed by trees.
The stream bubbled quietly at her side. The rain had stopped, or could not get
through the canopy. She picked her way carefully, testing every step, stretching
out her hands to feel for branches.
If these swordsmen had come by chance, then they might not
DAVE DUNCAN 7
know about Ov. They might not know that they would soon be in terrible danger
themselves.
Or they might have been brought by the Hand of the Goddess. In that case, their
interest must be more than just one murdered old warrior. Their objective might
be Ov itself—war! There might be a whole army down by the jetty. That was what
Kandoni had said to the first rumors of the massacre in Ov: "Sorcerers are not
allowed near the River!"
Then, when the rumors had became more solid, he had said, The Goddess will not
stand for it. She will summon Her swordsmen..."
Two days later Kandoni had himself been dead, felled before he even had time to
draw his sword, slain by a single trill of music. He had been a good man, in his
way. He had lived by die code of the swordsmen, an honorable man, if not a very
understanding or exciting husband for a juvenile apprentice priestess. She
wished she could have helped him more. She should have pretended a little
harder.
The local expert... but all she had were vague memories of the stories Kandoni
had told her, rambling on for hour upon hour, an old man with nothing but his
memories of youth and strength, of wenching and killing; an old mart clasping
his child bride in clammy embrace in a barren bed through endless winter nights.
She should have listened more carefully.
Quili stopped suddenly, heart thumping. Had she heard something ahead of her? A
twig snapping?
She listened, hearing only the stream and pattering dripping noises. It must
have been her imagination. She went on, more slowly, more cautiously. She had
been crazy to come without a light, for she knew that her night vision was poor.
The priesthood was sacrosanct. No one, not the worst brigand, would harm a
priestess. So they said.
She ought to be rejoicing at the thought of Kandoni being avenged. At fifteen
she had been married; at sixteen a widow. At seventeen she found it hard to
mourn, however much she reproached herself. She could perhaps have gone back to
the temple, when Swordsman Kandoni had no further need for her services, but she
had stayed. The tenants had made her wel-
8
THE COMING OF WISDOM
come and they needed her. So did the slaves, much more so. Her ladyship had let
her remain in the cottage and she provided basic fare—sacks of meal and
sometimes even meat. She sent small gifts once in a while: sandals not too badly
worn, leftover delicacies from the kitchen.
If the swordsmen did know about the sorcerers—if they were planning an attack on
Ov—then there must be a whole army of them.
Floundering in the darkness, she almost walked into a vague shape standing
square in her path, waiting for her.
She yelped and jumped backward, losing a shoe. "Priestess!" she squealed. Then
she managed a slightly lower: "I am a priestess!"
"Good!" said a youth's soft tenor. "And I am a swordsman. In what way may I be
of service, holy lady?"
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/D...-%2002%20-%20The%20Coming%20Of%20Wisdom.txt (4 of 184) [10/15/2004 2:29:07 PM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Dave%20Duncan%20-%2...Seventh%20Sword%20-%2002%20-%20The%20Coming%20Of%20Wisdom.txt
ft
It was an absurd situation. Standing on one leg in the dark, with her heart
still bounding wildly from the surprise, Quili could yet appreciate the
absurdity—neither she nor the stranger could see the other's rank. Who saluted
and who responded? But of course swordsmen would never send a mere First to
scout, nor a Second either. He must outrank her.
So she made the greeting to a superior, managing not to fall over, even in the
final bow: "I am Quili, priestess of the second rank, and it is my deepest and
most humble wish that the Goddess Herself will see fit to grant you long life
and happiness and to induce you to accept my modest and willing service in any
way in which I may advance any of your noble purposes."
The swordsman retreated one pace, and she heard, rather than saw, his sword whip
from the scabbard on his back. She almost lost her balance again, before
remembering that swordsmen had their own rituals, flailing their blades around
in salute.
"I am Nnanji, swordsman of the fourth rank, and am honored to accept your
gracious service."
DAVE DUNCAN 9
The sword shot back into its scabbard again with a hiss and a click. Random had
not handled his so slickly.
"Do you always stand on one foot, apprentice?"
She had not thought he would have been able to see. "I've lost a shoe, adept."
He chuckled and moved, and she felt a firm grip on her ankle. "Here it is.
Stupid-looking thing!" Then her foot was pushed back where it belonged, and the
swordsman straightened up.
"Thank you. You see very well..."
"I do most things very well," he remarked cheerfully. He sounded so young, like
a boy. Could he really be a Fourth? "Now, where is this, apprentice?"
"The estate of the Honorable Garathondi, adept."
The swordsman grunted softly. "What craft?"
"He is a builder."
"And what does a builder of the Sixth build? Wfell, never mind. How many
swordsmen on mis estate?"
"None, adept."
He grunted again, surprised. "What's the nearest village, or town?"
"Pol, adept. A hamlet. About half a day's walk to the north."
"There would be swordsmen there, then. .."
It was not a question, so she need not say that the resident swordsman of Pol
had died on the same day as her husband, or that bis assassination could not
have been reported, either. Prevent bloodshed!
"What city? How far?"
"Ov, adept. About another half day beyond Pol."
"Mm? Do you happen to know the name of the reeve in Ov?"
He was dead, also, and all bis men. To answer just "No!" would be a lie. Before
she could speak, the swordsman asked another question.
"Is there trouble here, Apprentice Quili? Brigands? Bandits? Work for honest
swordsmen? Are we in any immediate danger?1'
"No immediate danger, adept."
He chuckled. "Pity! Not even a dragon?*'
She returned the laugh with relief. "Not one."
"And you haven't seen any sorcerers recently, I suppose?"
10
THE COMING OF WISDOM
So he did know about the sorcerers! "Not recently, adept..."
He sighed. "Well, if it's safe, then we must have been brought here to meet
someone. Like Ko."
"Ko?"
"Have you never heard the epic How Aggaranzi of the Seventh Smote the Brigands
at KoT He sounded shocked. "It's a great tale! Lots of honor, lots of blood.
It's very long, but I'll sing it for you when we have time. Well, if there's no
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/D...-%2002%20-%20The%20Coming%20Of%20Wisdom.txt (5 of 184) [10/15/2004 2:29:07 PM]
摘要：

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Dave%20Duncan%20-%2...Seventh%\20Sword%20-%2002%20-%20The%20Coming%20Of%20Wisdom.txtTheFourthOathFortunateishewhosavesthelifeofacolleague,andgreatlyblesseda\retwowhohavesavedeachother's.Tothemonlyispermittedthisoathandit\shallbeparamount,absolute,andirrevoca...

展开>> 收起<<
Duncan, Dave - The Seventh Sword - 2 - The Coming Of Wisdom.pdf

共184页,预览5页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：184 页 大小：577.3KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-03

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 184
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注