The Whole Man (17 page)

Hao Sen shivered as he watched, not at the baleful threat in the beast’s eyes, which promised it would not stand for much more such treatment, but at the significance of the disease afflicting it.

While he was still reflecting on the implications, there was a blast of trumpets from behind him, and he turned. A procession of gorgeously uniformed soldiers was striding into the square, followed by men bearing a palanquin of rich silk and rare woods. Officers bawled for the proper respect to the Emperor, and like a forest felled at a single blow, everyone in the square dropped into the imperial kowtow.

When permission was given to rise, the Emperor was in place on his throne, surrounded by his train: mandarins of the peacock feather, personal servants with symbolic fans, and high officers of his army. Hao Sen scanned them with interest. His attention was drawn almost at once to a tall man in magnificent silken robes standing at the Emperor’s right, a little apart from the rest and apparently having no personal attendants with him.

Somehow that … smelled right. Hao Sen ignored the business which followed, the presentation of the caravan master and the display of choice goods to the Emperor, and studied the tall man. There was no overt resemblance, but that was hardly evidence. Consider, after all, his own body now. …

He broke off that thought with an almost physical jolt, and wondered whether it was still too soon to draw attention to himself. On the one hand, the completeness of the detail was a sign for caution; on the other, it implied that the secondaries were exceptionally well developed. He had arrived, in his own chosen disguise, arid and so far no hint had been given that his presence was suspect. …

He made up his mind, and worked forward through the crowd to the front row of those who had forgotten the attractions of the conjurers and mountebanks for the privilege of seeing the Celestial Emperor at close quarters. By now the Emperor had completed his inspection of the caravan master’s wares, and was leaning back on his throne casually eying the scene. It was a matter of moments before he caught sight of Hao Sen and said something to the caravan master.

“Why, we owe him a great debt!” the caravan master exclaimed. “He it was who chiefly inspired our guard to repel the bandits.”

“Let him come forward,” the Emperor said negligently.

An officer signaled to Hao Sen, who obediently marched to the foot of the steps and dropped on his knees in the kowtow. Directly he had completed the obeisance, he rose and stood with his hand on his sword and his shoulders thrown back.

The emperor looked him over. “A good fighting man,” he said with approval. “Ask him if he plans to join my army.”

“Celestial Master, your humble servant hears that the army will go forth this summer against the bandits. If he is granted the privilege of joining the enterprise, he will serve with all his heart!”

“Good,” said the Emperor briefly. His eyes lingered a moment on Hao Sen’s brawny frame. “Take his name, one of you,” he added. “And convey me back to the palace.”

Mechanically Hao Sen complied with the request of the officer who came to take his name and details of his experience. This was a routine precaution; if he was reduced to stripping away the reflectives one by one, he now had the background for turning a king-and-slave fantasy into something altogether less palatable. But he was satisfied the Emperor himself was only a reflective.

Then was the real ruler that tall man, standing apart? Or someone else, not engaged in this subsidiary part of the drama?

Once more, he postponed a decision.

The imperial procession had left the square when the shout went up.

“The dragon! The dragon!”

He spun around, seeing a wave of catastrophic panic break across the market like a bore in a river mouth. Buyers, sellers and entertainers alike streamed outward from the square, overturning booths, scattering merchandise and trampling old people and children in the rush. Hao Sen stood his ground, waiting for a clear view.

When he got it, he was chilled. The dragon was no longer sullenly submissive. It was an incarnation of menace. On three of its sharp-taloned legs it stood over the corpse of its former master, slashing at his face and turning it to bloody ruin.

It tired of its play, and paused, its yellow eyes scanning the great square. Hao Sen had half expected it to feed, for it would certainly have been kept hungry to weaken it. Yet its head did not dip to gnaw the corpse, and his heart gave a lurch as he realized that the square, apart from himself, was now completely empty.

He might have run. He had delayed too long. The slightest move would attract its attention, and somehow he was sure it could catch him, no matter how fast he fled. The reason why he had been made to leave his camel out of the square struck him like a blow. He had used his favorite trick once too often, and here was an opponent who employed it himself.

The dragon began to move, sidling toward him, its eyes unblinking and burning bright as the coals of the brazier it had overturned. Hao Sen glanced frantically around for a weapon. He saw the broken shaft of a tent close by, and jumped for it. The instant he did so, the dragon charged.

He hurled the tent pole javelin-fashion and dropped on his face. More by luck than accuracy of aim, the sharp wood hit fair on one of the mildew-weakened patches of scales. It made a barely noticeable gash, but the dragon howled with pain. It spun around and returned to the attack.

The first time he threw himself aside, dragging out his sword. The second time, he failed to dodge completely; the beast cunningly curled its tail in midair so that it caught his shoulder and the blow sent him sprawling. That tail was like a club, and the dragon must weigh as much as a man.

It landed now among a tangle of cords on a rope seller’s stall, and was hindered long enough for Hao Sen to devise a tactic to meet its next pounce. This time, instead of leaping sideways, he flung himself backward, in the same movement bringing up his sword point foremost so that it sank into the dragon’s underbelly.

The hilt was wrenched away with such force that it nearly sprained his wrist, and the impact made his head ring as it hit the paving. Shrieking with agony, the dragon scrabbled with its clawed hind feet, and a triple line of pain told him where the slashes penetrated his leggings.

He brought up one booted foot with all his force and kicked at the base of the beast’s tail. That hurt it sufficiently for it to forget him momentarily, while it doubled its neck back under its body and tried to pull the sword out with its teeth. Dark blood leaked down the hilt, but slowly.

Hao Sen rolled clear instantly. He considered attempting to gouge out the dragon’s eyes, but they were shielded by bony orbital ridges; he was more likely to lose his fingers. Desperately he sought a weapon to replace the lost sword, and saw none. The dragon abandoned its futile tugging at the sword, snarled, leaped again.

It came at him crookedly because the blade in its belly weakened one of its hind legs; nonetheless, its heavy tail curved toward his head in what threatened to be a stunning blow as it passed him. Gasping, Hao Sen seized the tail in both hands—and began to spin on his heels.

For one fantastic second he thought it was trying to climb down its own tail to get at him. Then the weight on his arm gave place to an outward tug. Four times— five—the market whirled dizzily; the dragon’s blood spattered an ever wider circle on the ground. He added one last ounce of violence to its course, swinging it upward, and let go.

Across the rope seller’s stall it flew, over the spilled coins to the booth of a money changer, and fell, its head twisted at a strange angle against the lowermost of the temple steps.

Hao Sen dropped his aching arms to his sides, panting. He looked at the dragon’s carcass, and beyond it, up the steps, until he met the gaze of the tall man who had stood there watching, leaning on a staff.

And then he knew.

XIX
xix

A good fight,” the man with the staff said in a tone calculated to suggest he had seen a dozen such. Hao Sen made no reply; his heart was hammering too violently. All his plans had gone to nothing now. He was utterly vulnerable.

His only hope was to try and maintain the fiction that his guise was merely the effect of the creation of a schizoid secondary personality in the general run of the fantasy. He spat in the dust, rubbed his hands together, and went over to the dragon to draw his sword from its belly.

A glance showed him it was useless; the hilt was bent at right angles to the blade. Cursing, lie he made to toss it aside.

“Wait!” said the man on the temple steps in a commanding tone. “A sword that has taken the life of a dragon is not a weapon to discard so lightly. Give it here.”

Reluctantly Hao Sen complied. The man took it and examined it carefully; then, muttering something Hao Sen could not catch—a charm, presumably—he made a ring of his thumb and first finger, which he ran the length of the staff he carried. He kept the ring closed while he put the staff in the crook of his elbow and grasped the sword hilt with his free hand. Then he passed the ring down the blade.

The blood curdled and fell away, leaving the metal bright. When he reached the point where it was bent, it first quivered and then sprang to straightness, singing.

“I am the wizard Chu Lao,” said the tall man in an offhand voice. “Here, take your sword!”

And the second after, he was gone.

Bleakly Hao Sen considered the facts as they presented themselves. They made a depressing total.

It was clear that for all his careful preparations he had made one hidden and potentially fatal assumption: that he was dealing with an opponent like his other opponents. He was
not.
He was up against a man capable of taking just such thorough precautions in the elaboration of his fantasies as in any other department of his existence. The patch of mildew on the flank of the dragon should have been warning enough. Detail like that was almost inconceivable unless it was a product of Hao Sen’s reaction with his environment, or the dragon was a schizoid secondary, not a construct.

He’d used that trick himself often enough; he had been planning to use it again when he conceived the camel Starlight. And whether by guesswork or foresight, he’d had that gun spiked at once.

So the dragon had been a schizoid secondary, with its own “real” personality. And the master of Tiger City was not the Emperor, luxuriating in pomp and adulation. He was Chu Lao, the wizard.

Wizard! He shivered. No wonder the very first breaths of this fantasy had borne to him suggestion of magic!

True, he remembered previous occasions on which there had been magic incorporated into a world-picture. But then he had found it to be mere childish grandiosity, hastily cobbled together and lacking coherence. The magic practiced by Chu Lao, on the other hand, would be consistent, rigorous, governed by carefully worked-out laws; it would be as rigid and inflexible as science. And Chu Lao knew those laws. Hao Sen didn’t

He abandoned his original plans completely. Not for him now the subtle undermining, the fencing for a chance to seize control, which had been his favorite technique in the past. To use the weapons forged by his enemy and fight on ground chosen by him—that was a certain path to exhaustion and defeat. He looked over the sword the magician had mended for him, his thoughts grim.

At all costs he must avoid defeat. To be beaten once would be -an irrevocable sentence of doom.

Yet somehow he must still work within the pattern set by his opponent; to disturb the basic hypotheses too drastically would give a chance for the mental rapport to be broken, and he might find himself wandering in a fantasy world of his own creation, in which he was deluded into believing he had actually succeeded, whereas all the opposition he had overcome consisted in straw men. …

He reached his decision. Brute force was the only chance he now had. Then let it be by force.

They came down from the hills, purposefully, in ordered ranks: no barbarian rabble, these bandits, but an army welded together by discipline into a single efficient machine. When they were still miles from Tiger City, the glint of morning sun on their shields and helmets caught the attention of the city guards, and at once there was a great running to and fro on the ramparts.

Riding easily on his camel at the head of his army, Hao Sen grinned into his beard. His long pike with its cruel head was couched in its rest, alongside Starlight’s stately neck; his sword tapped lightly on his thigh.

Let them fuss and flurry! It would do them little good. What he had in store was enough to shake everyone in Tiger City up to and including the arrogant Chu Lao.

For more than an hour the bandits tramped down from the hills, silent except for the banging of gongs which marked the step. They made no attempt to come within bowshot of the city, but followed the circumference of a circle and surrounded it. Pack animals laden with brushwood, wagons with dismantled siege-engines, and great store of food added up to an obvious conclusion: they were determined to besiege the city before the Emperor could equip his army and provide adequate forage for his planned campaign against them.