It wasn’t necessary, but Del and I both knew why he did it. We unrolled our blankets, flattened folds, and lay down, burrowing together for warmth. In the distance I heard the scream of a sandtiger, the yips of desert dogs.
“That was well done,” she said very quietly; the horses were not picketed particularly far away.
“What?—oh.” I spoke as quietly. “Well, the man is more his father than I am.”
“Neesha has much to think about. He has found you, found his dream of wishing to be a sword-dancer.”
I couldn’t argue with that. It was far safer living on a horse farm than dancing, but being safe was not what aspiring sword-dancers desired. Neesha might well have sought the life even if he weren’t my son, but he was, and he had tracked me down. He’d taken a handful of lessons from Abbu Bensir, when Abbu stopped over at the horse farm, and had spent much of his life practicing the forms; first those he made up, then those Abbu taught him. But I had beaten him in the circle, my son. Beaten him badly.
Which put me in mind of another young man who’d danced with me and lost. I shifted closer to Del, speaking very softly. “You don’t think he’s my son, do you?”
It startled Del, though she spoke as softly. “Neesha’s your son!”
“No, no—not Neesha. The fool. Khalid.”
“Why would you think he’s your son?”
“Because he’s doing very much what Neesha did, insisting on dancing against me. And now that I know Neesha’s in the world, there could be more offspring scattered throughout the South.”
“Don’t brag, Tiger.”
“Hoolies, Del, you know as well as I do that before I met you, I wasn’t exactly chaste.”
“You weren’t chaste even after you met me. I remember the caravan and Elamain.”
“Who?”
“Elamain. The woman we guarded on the way to her wedding.”
It took me a moment. It had been about six years since Del and I met. “Oh. Her.”
“Yes. Her.”
“I was a fool, bascha. And then I wasn’t anymore.”
“No. You gained wisdom, once I beat it into your head.”
I grinned into darkness.
“Go to sleep,” she whispered. “Neesha’s coming back.”
I wished her goodnight and allowed myself to fall off the precipice. Sleep is a good thing.
Chapter 7
DEL WAS UP AT DAWN. I woke up when she threw her covers back, but did not immediately join her. I knew what she was about.
The forms. The sheer grace of preparing a body to dance. Muscles warmed, loosened; the body’s agreement that it would do what it was told. When she was done, Del smiled. A sidelong glance told me she knew I was watching. She raised her brows in a question.
“Yes,” I said. “All right. You approve or reject your own dances. Point taken. And, I daresay, you will put that boy on his butt.”
“I’ve decided to teach him a lesson,” she said. “Nothing done too quickly. Nothing done so hastily that he can’t understand what’s being done to him. He needs to learn what it is he needs to learn.”
Before I untangled that, Neesha poked his head out from under blankets. He rubbed one eye. “What did I miss?”
Del smiled.
“Everything.” I flipped the blankets all the way back and stood up from my bedding. “I assume the idiot will be here soon. I’m going to go visit a bush now, so I don’t miss anything.”
“Oh,” Neesha said. “Me also.”
And as we moved with alacrity around the wide-canopied tree, the stud let loose a river to remind us of what we were about.
She moved beautifully, did my bascha. Her feet sluffed through the sand with the soft, seductive sibilance of bare flesh against fine-grained dust. Wisps rose, drifted; layered our bodies in dull, gritty shrouds: pale umber, ocher-bronze, taupe-gray.
Dawn had passed. All was clear now, in the newborn sunlight. As I drew the circle, the news was passed: a woman danced against a man. Some men, Southroners, laughed, disbelieving it. Khalid had walked over naked except for dhoti. And he carried an unsheathed sword.
The dance began as all dances do: two swords in the center of the circle, a sword-dancer on either side. This time, I was given the task of telling them to begin.
I watched her move. I watched the others watch her move. All men. No women here, at this moment, under such circumstances; never a woman.
Except for Del.
Admiration, as always. And pride. Two-edged pride. One, that the woman brought honor to the ritual of the dance within the circle, and two, that she was my right hand, my left hand; companion, swordmate, bedmate. Pride is always a two-edged blade. When it concerns Del, the second edge is the sharpest of all for me, because for the Sandtiger to speak of pride in Del is to speak also of possessiveness. She’d told me once that a man proud of a woman is too often prouder of his possession of her, and not of the woman for herself.
I saw her point, but…well, Del and I don’t always agree. But then, if we did, life would be truly boring.
“Gods,” Neesha said in wonder. “I’ve never seen her like this.”
I nodded. “You’ve seen her spar in order to teach. This is Del dancing.”
I watched the man she faced in the circle. Khalid showed more skill than he had before, and Southron-style: dip here, feint there, slash, lunge, cut, thrust…and always trying to throw the flashes and glints into her eyes; ordinarily, a shrewd ploy. Khalid displayed some experience. But while another opponent might have winced or squinted against the blinding light, giving over the advantage, Del didn’t.
I knew she could kill him if she wished, though Khalid didn’t. He hadn’t realized it yet.
Few men realize it when they enter the circle with Del. They see only the tall Northern woman with thick white-blond hair braided back, and blue, blue eyes; her perfect face with its sun-gilded flesh stretched taut across flawless bones. They see all of that, and her magnificent body, and they hardly notice the sword in her hands. Instead, they smile. They feel tolerant and magnanimous, because they face a woman, and a beautiful woman. And because she is beautiful they will give her anything, if only to share a moment of her time, and so they give her their lives.
But she wasn’t here to kill Khalid.
She danced. Long legs, long arms, bared to the Southron sun. Step. Step. Slide. Skip. Miniscule shifting of balance from one hip to the other. Sinews sliding beneath the flesh of her arms as she parried and riposted. All in the wrists with Del. A delicate tracery of blade tip against the afternoon sky, blocking Khalid’s weapon with a latticework of steel.
“Hoolies,” Neesha whispered. “She’s playing with him.”
“She’s not,” I told him. “This is a lesson. Whether he will heed it is up to him.”
Neesha shook his head, spellbound.
“You did wager on her, didn’t you?”
Neesha’s mouth twisted. “I thought it might not be polite.”
“To wager on Del while everyone else—except me, of course—is wagering on Khalid? Hoolies, kid, Del and I made a living for nearly a year doing this. I thought you were smarter than that!”
Neesha scowled. “Apparently not.”
I agreed wholeheartedly. “Apparently not.”
“Sword-dancer?” The question came from a man who stepped up next to me, slipping out of the crowd to stand closer to me than I liked. “Sandtiger?”
I glanced briefly. Young man. Copper-skinned. Swathed in a rich silk burnous of melon orange, sashed with a belt of gold-freighted bronze. A small turban hid most of his dark hair, but not the fringe of dark brown lashes surrounding hazel eyes.