So it began, and so it went on, that dance of hunters and quarry that I can still see in its every pace to this day. Nyateneri plainly had no desire to come to close quarters with Blue Eyes and Half-Mouth, unarmed or no: her goal was the door and the night beyond. For their part, they wanted nothing but to get past her dagger, and room to use their long, thin hands. One on each side of the fire-trench, they pressed and harried her, trusting themselves to wear her down, content to let her whirl and jeer and flurry out of their grasp, knowing that sooner or later she must stumble, must misjudge, must need one breath too many. They had her both ways: she could not kill them; and, elude them as she might, as long as she might, she could not get out of the bathhouse. The end was certain—I knew it as well as they.
Ah, but Nyateneri! She assumed nothing, conceded nothing. There was a third element, the fire-trench itself, and she built every foray, every sortie around it, springing back and forth to safety only when one or another pair of hands were closing upon her, trying constantly to lure her pursuers into fiery space, right down onto the burning stones. Twice she almost managed it: one time Half-Mouth was actually in the air, actually flailing his arms and legs in silent, gaping horror, when Blue Eyes snatched him to safety with one arm, cheerfully saluting Nyateneri with the other. Her dagger danced its own butterfly dance, even when she was in full leap or mid-roll, and she left her mark on those two, each time so swiftly that it might be minutes before they noticed themselves bleeding in two new places. She was the first warrior I had ever seen.
But she could not reach the door. Finally, nothing mattered but the fact that she could not reach the door. Scratches or no scratches, Blue Eyes and Half-Mouth’s endurance was yet greater than hers, and one of them could allow the other time to rest, as she dared not allow it to herself. Even now she was slipping most of their blows; but when one or another fingertip or palm-edge or elbow as much as grazed her, the shock clearly roared through her whole body, and each time she was slower to recover, slower to escape to another momentary sanctuary on the other side of the fire-trench. Half the time I could only go by sound even to guess what was happening, but one moment is with me now, telling it: she has gathered herself, gathered in all her hakai—oh, you don’t have that word, do you? let’s say her deepest strength, it’s the best I can do—and flies straight across the trench, out of the corner into which Blue Eyes has driven her, straight at Half-Mouth’s throat. A gallant gamble, but a rash one— Half-Mouth takes two steps back, one to the left, and smashes her down with a two-handed blow that knocks the dagger from her hands and sends it skidding back toward the fire. Lunging dazedly, desperately after it, she goes partway over the edge herself, and completely out of my range of vision. The dagger spins away on its side: red, silver, red.
And still she makes no sound. All I can hear is Blue Eyes and Half-Mouth’s soft, joyous giggling; all I can see is the aching happiness in their faces as they rush past my spy-hole, closing on Nyateneri. Then nothing. Nothing for how long? Five seconds? ten? half a minute? I have turned from the wall, my eyes closed, too numb for grief—like Tikat, perhaps—vaguely conscious that I should run, run, get to the inn, the stable, anywhere, before those two come out and find me. But I cannot move, not to help Nyateneri then, not to save myself now—and it has been like this before. Fire, blood, laughing men, and me aware, aware but unable: lost and alone and terrified past thought, past breath. It has been like this before. There was a huge man who smelled like bread and milk.
No sense in any of that for you, is there? No. I only opened my eyes when I heard Half-Mouth’s snarl of incredulous outrage, for all the world like a shukri who has suddenly discovered that mice can fly. How she had saved herself from the burning stones, I have no idea to this day, but as I stooped to the spy-hole again, Nyateneri backflipped across my sight and stood there for a moment, the dagger in her right hand now, and the left hanging oddly crooked. Oh, but I do remember her—as I shouldn’t, for any number of reasons—with her ragged, graying hair sticking out on all sides, her mouth glorious with mockery and her body wearing blood-flecked sweat as a queen wears velvet. Want her? Did I still want her? I wanted to be her, with all my soul, do you understand me? Do you understand?
It was the end, you see, and even I knew it. When she challenged them once more in their own tongue, there was a shadowy wheeze in her voice; when she crouched, arms open, coaxing them into her embrace, one knee trembled—only a very little, but if I noticed it, you can imagine what Blue Eyes and Half-Mouth saw. Her left hand was plainly useless, and she kept shaking her head slightly, as though to clear it of doubt or a lingering dream. There was no fear in her, and no resignation either. Blue Eyes moved into view, smiling, touching his brow with a forefinger in a way that was no salute this time but a farewell. Nyateneri laughed at him.
And suddenly I was there. No, I don’t mean to brag that at last I sprang into decisive, heroic action, for I don’t believe that I could have looked a second time into those two men’s faces for anyone’s sake. I mean only that I knew I was Rosseth, which was, for good or ill, something more than a pair of eyes peering through a crack in a wall. I could think again, and I could move, and feel anger as well as terror and dull loss; and what else I could do was what I had come there to do in the first place. I lifted the bucket that I had absurdly never set down, bent, and carefully poured the water into the channel at the base of the wall.
You have to do it slowly; it always takes less water than you think to fill the bathhouse with steam. I heard one of them shout, then another, and then a wild surge of laughter from Nyateneri which—I will swear—made the log wall pulse like warm, living flesh against my cheek I emptied the bucket, straightened, and set my eye to the crack in time to see Half-Mouth backing toward me, seemingly setting himself to chop billowing nothingness to pieces with his deadly hands and feet. Nyateneri’s dagger, glinting demurely, slipped through the steam as gently as it did through the skin just below his ribs. The first thrust probably killed him, though I think there was another. He folded silently forward into clouds.
I dropped the bucket and crept to the door. Blue Eyes had to be stopped there if he tried to flee, somehow impeded long enough for Nyateneri to catch up with him. I had no plans: I knew that whatever I did might likely mean my death, and I was frightened but not paralyzed, no more of that. I have done a great many foolish things in all the years between that night and this, but never, never again through inaction, and I never will until I do die. Nyateneri taught me.
Crouching by the door, I cursed myself for abandoning the bucket; perhaps I could have hit Blue Eyes with it, or thrown it in his way when he bolted from the bathhouse. It didn’t cross my mind for a minute that he might not bolt, but he might still be more than a match on his own for an exhausted Nyateneri. There was no sound from beyond the door. I imagined Blue Eyes and Nyateneri circling invisibly in the steam, all bearings lost except for the sense of the enemy inches away: reaching for each other with their skins and their hair. Something cracked against the logs from inside—a solid, unyielding thud that could easily have been a skull—and I promptly began my new life of active stupidity by pushing the door open.