Tuesday, April 28, 2708, continued

          (I don't want Randy to see.  I bought a cigar.  I went out and bought a cigar.  I found myself shaking all over, feeling like I'd shiver into a thousand pieces if I didn't do something, and somehow this seemed like the thing to do, so I went and bought the damned thing.

          And now I smoke it, hiding in an alley glossy with a recent rain, marveling.  How familiar it tastes, bittersweet and strangely sustaining.  The feel in the mouth, in the lungs, in the nerves.  How the smoke curls on the air.  I feel dizzy watching the smoke-patterns, trying to read something in them before they shift.  And somehow these things comfort me for an old ache in my heart.

          I have killed.  In my past, a scar behind me whenever I look back.  Necessity has demanded it of me, from time to time, but it never comes easy.  Sometimes the horror of it just wells up in me, surging and trying to come out, but everybody knows that I can't cry, I lost the gift of tears years ago, knocked out of me by my brutal father.  I shake ashes off the tip of the cigar, and they fall, dry to crumbling, onto the wet street.

          Randy has never had to kill.  I can't talk to him about it.

          Oh, he wouldn't judge me.  He would pour out sympathy and try to understand.  Maybe that's it.  Maybe I don't want him to understand.  Not ever.

          I puff on the cigar.  Remembering old faces.  Julie—hardest of all was Julie.  E didn't ask to lose hir mind.  Then again, I didn't ask to be the only one capable of stopping the poor, crazed ex-commando.  We get a lot of things we never asked for.

          I drop the butt into a puddle.  It hisses.  I litter, but I don't feel like groping in the muddy water for the disgusting thing.  I turn and walk away.)

* * *

Now that the dawn gives us enough light, at least, to see what we're dealing with, Lucinda chuckles as she wrings the bloody water from the rag.  "Shot off a piece of your ear, did they?  You lucky stiff!"  Lufti just grins foolishly as I daub on ointment and we bandage him up.  "You'll have something to tell your grandchildren when they ask why your ears don't match."

He reaches up to the bandage.  "It still stings, though."

Lucinda laughs.  "Of course it stings, and thank God for it!  You could be feeling nothing at all, right now, with Miko for your hammock-mate."  She grunts as she stands up and goes over to the guns.  "Hmf--as many as we could haul, and not near enough to arm Home Base."

"Something's always better than nothing," Damien says.

"Right you are, Bard.  But when we drop these off we won't be able to keep many for ourselves."

Kief smiles radiantly, that way he has.  "We can gather more as we go.  We've done it before."

"Yep, but not you, not this time.  My best sharpshooter gets top priority when we pass the guns around."  He nods acknowledgment.  "Fatima, you get a gun, too.  Me, I can do just fine improvising."  She flexes a muscle and the weasel-girls grin back at her.  "Deirdre, you..."

"I can improvise, too--I've done it my whole career."  The pistol that Kief returned to me weighs heavier in my pocket than the lead that it rests upon.  I hand it over to her, saying, "I've fought with farm tools, carpentry tools, all kinds of things in the service of Lovequest."  And have precious little memory of it, but she doesn't need to know that.

She examines the deadly thing and nods.  "Lufti," she says, "Cyran told me you showed great promise in target practice--think you can deliver on that promise?"

He nods, wide-eyed, dried blood still streaking his face here and there.

"He will," Kief says, "because I'll train him--give him as good as I got at his age."

Lucinda chuckles as she hands the gun over.  "That's fine," she says, winking at the boy, "Because Cyran also told me you're just plain awful at hand-to-hand."  She pulls out our last pack of cigarettes and passes them around so that we can have smoke for breakfast, since we couldn't carry anything more substantial that might get in the way of hauling loot.  Amazing, how tobacco cuts the hunger.

Lucinda says, "Sing us a song, bard, as we march--it's safe enough now, I think."  And as Damien begins his song we take up our burdens again.  First he hums, surprising me, because I recognize the tune.  Then, in a high and haunting voice he sings,

 

"I have no father, no mother; I make Heaven father, Earth my mother.

I have no home; I make awareness my home.

I have no life, no death; I make the tides of breathing my life and death.

I have no sacred power; I make honesty my sacred power.

I have no money; I make understanding my money."

 

When his orphan voice cracks on the edge of manhood, it only makes the melody more poignant. 

 

"I have no body; I make endurance my body.

I have no limbs; I make promptness my limbs.

I have no ears; I make sensitivity my ears.

I have no eyes; I make the lightning-flash my eyes.

I have no magic secrets; I make character my magic secret.

 

And what does Aron make his feet--devotion?

 

"I have no talents; I make quick wit my talent.

I have no tactics; I make emptying and filling my tactics.

I have no strategy; I make a blank slate my strategy.

I have no miracles; I make good deeds my miracles.

I have no friends; I make my mind my friend."

 

All around us the rainforest chirps and mutters softly to itself, Damien's voice another trill on the air of the birds who eat what they find, shelter where they can, get by as best they may.

 

"I have no enemy; I make carelessness my enemy.

I have no shield; I make benevolence my shield.

I have no armor; I make righteousness my armor.

I have no fortress; I make stubbornness my fortress.

I have no sword; I make selflessness my sword."

 

"I know that song," I say at last.  "It doesn't come from here."

Damien looks at me, puzzled.  "Where, then?"

"All the way from Earth."  That catches his breath.  "And even further back than you might think--14th century Japan.  We think a Samurai might've written it, probably of the Bushido school.  We don't know for certain."

"Whoever he was," Lufti says, "He must've been lonely."

Gruffly Lucinda adds, "And stronger than his loneliness--bigger.  That's the important part.  We all hurt sometimes, but we gotta make ourselves bigger than anything that hurts us."

Kiril asks, "Is that why Malcolm got so fat?"  Damien snickers against his will.

"Maybe," I say, "But there are better ways, believe me."

Damien asks, "How do you know so much about old songs?  Do the Tilián train agents in poetry?"

"Of course they do—did you think I made up that stuff about the importance of bards?”  For Lucinda had quoted me to him and Kanarik when she gathered them up.  “But this song--the Tilián love this song.  I sang it as a child--in a different language, of course.

In a surprisingly gentle voice Chulan asks, "Do you ever get homesick to hear your own language?"

I look around me at the incredible green beauty that surrounds us, miles and miles of it, so similar and yet so different, in leaf and scent and wild call, from the eucalyptine rainforests of home.  "All the time," I say.  "But I've trained to be bigger than that."