Five Odd Honors (50 page)

The action hurt exquisitely, but the bath attendants didn’t comment when tears rolled down his face.

They laid him facedown on a bench. Without ceremony or explanation,

they dumped buckets of tepid water over him. Loyal Wind saw the color of the water that swirled down the drains in the floor. Gagged when he saw it was the brownish-black of raw sewage, highlighted here and there with green and orange that might be fungus.

When the rinse water ran more or less clear, the attendants turned Loyal Wind over and poured water over his front, even into his face, although one did hold a hand over his nose and mouth. When he whimpered and tried to rinse his mouth, she held a thick pottery cup to his lips, let him drink just a little.

Then Loyal Wind was put into a large tub filled with steaming water. His hair was washed three times, then cut. His beard and mustache were clipped, as were his nails. The attendants never spoke to him, but they did heed his whimpers of pain when they raised an arm or moved a leg too suddenly. They didn’t apologize, but handled him more gently thereafter.

When the bath was over, Loyal Wind still could not walk—his feet were hideously swollen—but this time he was not dragged. With impressive strength, the women lifted him out of the water and onto a massage table. Head dangling luxuriously, Loyal Wind submitted gratefully to rubbing that eased his tormented joints. The final step was application of an ointment that smelled strongly of lanolin.

Still naked, he was placed in a chair with wheels on the sides. One of the bath attendants wheeled him into the hallway. Loyal Wind dreaded seeing his jailers again, but waiting for him, forms in hand, was a severe-looking woman of middle age. Her features were finer, even attractive, and Loyal Wind wondered how she had come to be here.

A concubine, perhaps, grown past interest, childless? A spare daughter?

Loyal Wind recognized the return of curiosity as a danger. He had managed to stop caring, to stop thinking. Now with his body no longer in as much pain, his mind was coming alive.

The severe woman wheeled Loyal Wind to a small chamber where she spooned rice mush into him and gave him more water to drink. The quantities were small, but Loyal Wind’s shriveled stomach could hardly accept them.

As with the others who had handled him since his removal from the cell, the severe woman spoke only when absolutely necessary.

Loyal Wind didn’t care. If he didn’t speak, he couldn’t betray his fear that they were only doing this to him so that they could put him in the box again.

Next the severe woman took Loyal Wind to a place where he was clad in a light sleeveless cotton tunic that came to beneath his knees. Clothing him even in this simple garment took three orderlies, because his limbs still would not answer to his command.

Their final destination was a small room, hardly twice the width of the cot set to one side. It had a small window, set high, and the now-familiar barred door.

An orderly laid Loyal Wind faceup on the cot. The severe woman gave him more to drink, then indicated a wide-mouthed pot set on the floor next to the cot.

“If you must vomit, try to hit that. If you must evacuate your bowels, call for an orderly. Try not to make a mess.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Loyal Wind managed. His voice creaked like that of an elderly cricket.

“Hmmm . . .”

The severe woman left, and when she returned she had a bell attached to a length of light rope. The bell was hung from the ceiling over the cot.

“Can you pull that?”

Loyal Wind moved his hand. The fingers were not in as bad shape as his feet because he had been able to keep them mostly out of the filthy water. He was clumsy, but the bell rang authoritatively.

“Good. Rest now. You may also request food or water, but will only be given small amounts. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The orderly came a few hours later, offered water, silently anointed Loyal Wind’s feet with one ointment and his joints with another. This was the routine, day and night, for what Loyal Wind thought was about two days. He couldn’t be certain, because he spent much time asleep, and the light from the high window was indirect and faint.

The swelling in Loyal Wind’s feet gradually diminished, and on the day he could walk, the orderly took him for a stroll—more like a stagger—down the corridors. There, glimpsed through a window, Loyal Wind saw something that made returning to his former dull, animal complacency impossible.

There was a garden, flower-filled, and in that garden walked Copper Gong. She was alone, apparently deep in thought. Her clothing was simple but of good quality. The brief look Loyal Wind saw of her face showed it to be drawn, but not unduly harassed.

Returned to what he now thought of as his hospital cell, Loyal Wind tossed and turned on the cot, his mind afire with speculation.

Had Copper Gong joined the enemy or was she being exercised much as he had been? Her clothing had not been as fine as he would have expected that of a royal advisor to be, but she had been alone, with no guards apparent.

Had he been meant to see her, or had it truly been the chance glimpse it seemed? Loyal Wind tried to reach out to Copper Gong, tried to touch her through the closeness of their shared House, but as always since they entered this part of the Lands, there was no ch’i for him to tap, and his own body was far too weak to supply surplus.

Loyal Wind’s thoughts ran round and round, fearing, dreading, until the orderly came and gave him a soporific.

When he slept, Loyal Wind’s dreams swirled with tormented speculation.

Slowly Loyal
Wind became stronger. He graduated from rice gruel to solid, simple food, from sips of water to strong tea. His hospital cell, once a welcome refuge, began to seem like a cage, but he never asked to be taken out, only welcomed the increasing frequency and duration of his walks.

He was given a shorter tunic and a pair of simple cotton pants: peasant’s clothing, but welcome for the modicum of dignity that came with it. Every day he was permitted to bathe; every two days, an orderly shaved him and trimmed his facial hair.

But although Loyal Wind grew stronger, his mind was increasingly troubled. His sense of the fortification was that it was quite large, but even so, he caught glimpses of his former companions—now fellow prisoners.

Or were they? He saw Copper Gong more than once, usually apparently alone, but once in conversation with a woman who might have been his severefaced “hostess.”

He saw Des Lee, clad in scholar’s robes, engaged in what seemed to be heated debate with two men in similar attire.

Once he thought he saw Gentle Smoke, but the Snake was walking away from him, down a flower-lined avenue, so he couldn’t be certain.

Another time, through a lattice screen, he saw Riprap, bare to the waist, his dark skin glistening with sweat, stick-fencing with a stocky man similarly attired. Riprap’s expression was intent, and although a welt rose from one upper arm, his opponent bore similar marks, so this did not seem evidence of his having been beaten.

Twice, once coming from the bath, another time when being escorted to the garden where Loyal Wind most frequently was taken to exercise, he saw Nine Ducks—perhaps a bit slimmer than when they had last seen each other, but otherwise serene—walking down a corridor. Once she had a scroll in her hand, as if she had been reading.

Since Loyal Wind had been offered no entertainment other than his periodic exercise and grooming, he took this as a sign that Nine Ducks was in good odor with Li Szu. His heart burned with anger, for somehow he hadnever thought the stolid, determined Ox would be among those to betray their cause.

Flying Claw was the one member of their company Loyal Wind never glimpsed, even fleetingly or uncertainly. This disheartened Loyal Wind more than the apparent evidence that the others might have turned traitor, for he knew there was no reason for Li Szu to preserve the young Tiger, and every reason to destroy him. Dead, Flying Claw’s hold on the Third Earthly Branch would be released, and Thundering Heaven could possibly claim it and grow in strength.

With nothing to do but eat, rest, and wait like a pampered dog to be taken for walks, Loyal Wind was left alone with his thoughts and fears. He cursed those who must have betrayed their cause. Forgave them. Hated them all over again.

His nightmares were full of the box, of feeling himself slowly rotting away, of being found stuffed in a box, a skeleton, clad in nothing but shreds of flesh.

Again and again in nightmares, Loyal Wind was carried to the box and screamed protest. Clubbed nearly senseless. Shoved inside. Sometimes his friends came to the window and pleaded with him to join them. Other times, they merely laughed at him for being a fool.

At last, what Loyal Wind had dreaded from the moment he had first been pulled semiconscious from the box cell occurred.

He was taken as usual to the baths. This time, after he had finished anointing himself with healing ointments, he was handed first undergarments, then inner robes, and finally a brilliant red courtier’s robe. This last was not embroidered with the Horse, but otherwise much resembled what Loyal Wind had worn in his first audience before Li Szu.

Loyal Wind forced himself not to panic, but his gorge rose. Swallowing bile, he donned the robe, put soft slippers on his nearly healed feet, and carefully combed his hair and beard.

The severe-faced woman met him outside the bath house and escorted him to the door of the palace, where he was met by the same official who had brought him before Li Szu that first time. This time there were no guards, and Loyal Wind did not know whether to be offended or not. He hated to think himself tamed, gelded by fear, but clearly Li Szu thought this was the case.

The corridors were the same, the audience hall as grand, but this time Loyal Wind had eyes only for the man in the deceptively simple robes who sat upon the carved chair on the raised dais.

“You have had time to meditate,” Li Szu said. “What is your answer?”

Loyal Wind met the cold eyes, and answered simply.

“I will not betray my associates. I cannot join you.”

“Then you will go back to the box,” Li Szu said. “And this time, I do not think you will come out.”

Loyal Wind did not answer, but he found the strength for the slightest of smiles.

He had betrayed a trust once, and tormented himself during the long century and more after his death. Did Li Szu really think he could do worse to Loyal Wind than Loyal Wind had already done to himself?

A nasty note of glee had sound-tracked Pearl’s dreams these last several nights, glee combined with a sense of being on a roller coaster. She ricocheted around turns, up and down hills, pulled by a force as inevitable as gravity toward something that felt ominously like her own destruction.

None of the auguries Pearl and her associates had worked had helped them pinpoint the source of these invasive nightmares. They had confirmed that the nightmares were in some way linked to Pearl’s association with Thundering Heaven, but since Pearl had suspected this all along, she felt no more secure.

Nissa’s shamefaced yet defiant confession that she had phoned Brenda Morris, and that Brenda and an anonymous—“but almost certainly male”—friend were on their way from South Carolina, provided a welcome distraction.

“The only thing I feel certain of,” Nissa said as she and Pearl sat discussing the matter over afternoon tea, “is that Brenda has confided at least some of our current problem to this friend, and that is why he is coming.”

“You’re sure it’s not her father?”

“Absolutely. I didn’t need to see Breni’s face to know that she was pretty unhappy when I admitted that we’d not communicated with her about recent developments at Gaheris’s request.”

“I wonder,” Pearl said, “if we should tell Gaheris that Brenda is coming here?”

“Let him,” Nissa said with a definite edge to her voice, “find out by showing up himself.”

Shen, who had returned the evening before from New York, bringing with him Umeko’s blessing and the promise that his son Geoffrey was prepared to join them if he was needed, entered the family room at that point.

“I agree with Nissa. I’d like to say that Gaheris isn’t behaving like himself, but that would be untrue. He is behaving perfectly like himself—at least where Albert is concerned.”