And that evening, when he sat down on the porch with his bowl of rice:
"What in hell are you looking at?" he asked her.
"Master?"
"Just then. What were you looking at?"
"Nothing, master Saukendar."
He scowled at her and jabbed the chopsticks her direction. "Don't give me that kind of answer. Nothing, master Saukendar. Your eyes were open. You were awake. What in hell were you looking at?"
She bit her lip and said nothing.
"I don't like secrets, girl. Did I talk to you about honesty? You said teach you the sword. Let me tell you there's more to it than chopping wood or necks. Let me tell you there's an obligation to honorable behavior. About time I taught it to you. Do you want to answer my question?"
"I was noticing—you go off your center when you don't have to, master Saukendar."
"What about my center?" He stared at her in vexation, thinking first she had taken leave of her senses, and then that she was deliberately insulting him.
"When you were using the axe. You were off your center."
"Damned right I go off my center. Has it taken you this long to notice the limp?"
"I didn't mean that."
"What do you mean?"
She looked at him, swallowed hard and said: "When you use the axe. You do it on a lot of things. You're turning your knee and your foot. You don't have to."
Damned impudent brat, was behind his teeth; but his own speech about honesty stuck in his throat. He was outraged. He wondered, mad as it made him, about that nagging stiffness in his back that had begun to trouble him in the last year or so.
Is it age? he wondered, over a mouthful of rice.
Is she right?
"I don't mean to speak out of turn, master Saukendar."
He simply glared at her. She ducked her head and ate her dinner.
But when he got up from the porch he wondered, when he walked inside he wondered: he tried to feel the extent of stretch in his legs and the line of his back and could not decide.
He wondered the next day too, went back to the back and split some logs himself, and damn, he was doing it, curling the toes on his lame side, turning the knee inward to save the leg not from pain but from the memory of pain. That was the stupid truth.
He took a deliberate swing at the log with the leg straight and felt not the pain, but the strain of weakened muscles.
He looked up then at a movement by the front corner of the cabin, and saw Taizu looking at him.
Damn you, he thought, and knew beyond a doubt she understood why he had taken a sudden notion to chop the wood himself this morning.
Especially since she ducked guiltily back around the corner, as if she had not known what he was about back behind the house.
He thought about it every time he did something familiar—when he carried buckets, climbed the porch steps, when he stood up or sat down. He made himself use both legs equally, and he knew, dammit, he knew that she was able to see that he was walking straighter and damned well sure why.
So one was honest. So one was a gentleman. One did not beat the pig-girl for telling the truth she was able to see. One was even grateful.
One wanted to go hunting, say, for three and four days and not have her dour, calculating stare shot his way when he limped and when he did not. But he would have to come back then, either limping or not, either having begun to do something about his habit or not, and in either case to have the damned girl staring at him and knowing she was right.
So one just tried not to favor the leg, that was all; one refused to limp even on a cool morning when the old wound ached. One went down to the stable where the girl could not see, and practiced the exercises he had not done in years, until the leg ached enough to set his teeth on edge, and his back hurt, and he earnestly wished that he could make up an excuse to use the hot compresses himself; but that also admitted that she was right.
And he refused to do that.
Chapter Five
There's a boy coming," Taizu said, panting from the uphill dash, not panic, just news: they had both been looking for that visitor ever since the first red had touched the leaves.
"Get out of sight," Shoka said, which they had agreed on, too.
The village tends to gossip, he had said, when he explained the matter to her; and gossip gets down the roads as far as traders go, and it's far, far better if I do nothing at all out of the ordinary. Let the village think you've gone. Let them think I sent you off like the others. And he thought, in a sudden cold flash, remembering the bandits: For the gods' sake don't let them know I've got a girl up here....
Because of a sudden it had occurred to him that she was not the skinny waif who had come up the mountain—hair dusty and dull and bobbed, body bowed under that damn basket.
The girl he was looking at was clear-skinned and bright-eyed and better-fed, hair shining and shoulder-length, her every move balanced on hips that had nothing to do with the way a boy's were set.
Damn!
And he had thought, in that same visionary moment, that if the village sent up one of the boys who had been on the mountain before, there would still be gossip even if he never had eyes on Taizu.
Something's different, the boy would be saying directly as he got back to the village... because there was a more prosperous look to the clearing this year, in the way the garden thrived, with the beans staked up, the little plot of herbs in neat rows—he could not put exact words to it himself, except that Taizu had a way of putting things in their place, and keeping things orderly, and she hoed and she weeded and even attacked the vines that tried to creep into the clearing and wind around the fence-posts and overgrow the path to the spring: she put up pegs to hang things on; she racked the hoe and the rake like weapons; she hung up the onions in chains and the herbs and roots in bunches.
Not the same, he thought. Nothing was the same on the mountain. And he could not imagine how he had ever thought about turning the girl over to the nuns.
Now she slipped off around the side of the cabin to take herself, he imagined, to the vantage-point upon the knoll from which she would watch the trading. Being Taizu.
And he took his bundled furs, an uncommonly good lot of them, from the rafter where they hung, and brought them out to the porch as the boy from the village trudged up with his pack of rice and other goods.
"Master Saukendar," the boy said—Shoka did know him, but it struck him that he had never bothered to learn the boy's name, a stocky, broad-faced lad, who wiped the sweat from his brow and set the packs down.
"Boy." Shoka nodded courteously as the boy bowed; and found himself wondering about the youth—his family, who he was, why he was for the last several years the one the village chose to bring its gifts. But it seemed late to ask things like that and Shoka had no idea at all why it suddenly mattered, or why questions occurred to him that never had—
—except once upon a time Saukendar the Emperor's right arm had known everything in court, and kept an attentive eye on details; and nowadays Shoka the recluse had given up the court and all that went with it.
Damn the girl, anyway. It was more than the weeds she chopped away at.
So he kept his questions and his curiosity to himself. Questions from his side encouraged questions from the boy's side, and that was nothing he wanted. Questions about the world brought answers about the world, and he had stopped wanting to hear about it nine years ago.
So he brought out his furs, he cast them grandly in a pile on the porch and said modestly: "I'll want a few loads of straw, if you can. I've some patching to do."