The Eighth King (The White Umbrella Testament Book 1) Read online

  “We will repulse them,” said Datang, “invigorated by this martial sentiment you find so distasteful.”

  “We will not repulse them,” Netten said quietly. “By now, Therku is theirs. I know the state of its garrison; with Gyaltsen and the royal army hemmed in by the Iron Eunuch, it has failed by now. It was never meant to turn back a full-throated invasion. They will sink their hooks farther into our land, and thoughtless bloodshed will only dig them deeper, faster.”

  Lin Yongten’s face was dark. “Diplomacy will not avail us overmuch either, Netten.”

  “It may,” said Netten, “if we prove ourselves fair and potent enemies. If the Priestkiller Worm is allowed to make his stroke, we will be neither. We will be like whipped dogs, who snap because it is all they can think to do. Then the Gardeners will respond in kind. Such reciprocal violence can linger for centuries and never heal.”

  “And slavery cannot?” said Datang. “Careful before you pronounce war a greater evil than indenture, Netten. Perhaps you are not proud of your grandfather’s bid for our province, but we freemen of Shrastaka are proud of our part in it—and we would die sooner than reverse it.”

  “For one,” said Lin Gyat, “I support the bloodthirst of Shrastaka. Though, I must say, the violence on this quest has been in the main one-sided, and not agreeably so.”

  They had reached the edge of the bamboo, which now looked less like a floor of sky than like a wall, as endless and variable as the heavens. “Well, you shall have a chance at a more favorable one-sided encounter,” said Netten. “Unlimber your monk’s spade, Envied of Snakes, and prepare to take my place in half an hour.” With no further ceremony, Netten leapt from his horse, a saber-length blade of pure white light extending from his arm, and he began hewing the bamboo down to foot-high stalks, making a barely man-wide path into the grass.

  “The Black,” Lin Gyat complained, “this is not the sort of violence I had in mind.”

  “Be of good cheer, Envied of Snakes,” said Netten. “Who knows what licentious spirits you might entice with the might of your thews?”

  “I am not so simple as to rise to such transparent bait,” said Lin Gyat. “I will not begin my shift one moment in advance.” But he insisted on riding directly behind Netten, his eyes darting from side to side in the bamboo, fingering his long monk’s spade and moistening his lips.

  Hewing the road went much slower on Lin Gyat’s shifts than it did on Netten’s, but the black-clad freeman seemed more drained by his work when it was over; he rode with closed eyes, his bay mare guided by Datang, his face pale and drawn. But he would take no more than a bit of wine well mixed with water. “The strain is not physical,” he said in response to Datang’s protests. “The bamboo poses no resistance to the Eight Weapon Hand, as it does to the monk’s spade.”

  “That may be,” said Datang, “but swinging one’s arm for hours a day is tiring of itself.”

  “I do not pretend that food would be unwelcome,” said Netten, “but I do not think I can eat until I have had a longer respite from the Rigors. They are no better adapted for road-making than for bridge-burning.”

  For all that, though, it was Netten who first noticed the disturbance in the bamboo. “Do you not hear it?” he said. “That rustle that was approaching and is now receding? Keep an ear out.” They all hoped it was a hallucination, but Lin Gyat caught it the next time, when he was ahorse and Netten hewing. “It is quicker than you think it could be, for such a subtle sound,” he said. “A few seconds approaching, a few receding, then silence. I do not believe it crosses our path, fortunately. I would guess it is a great serpent, but if it were, I should have expected to catch sight of it.”

  “Perhaps the pythons of the Earthen Sky are blue-scaled, and invisible in the bamboo,” said Lin Yongten. But no one was inclined to take up the joke. Both times the sound had come from the south; they bent their trajectory slightly northward and pressed on.

  It was only after the fourth time they had heard the sound, during a rest break in the mid-afternoon, that Datang realized something. “Since the second time, we have only heard it when we have corrected our course southward, whereon we have recorrected, to avoid it. Is it possible we are being herded?”

  The thought darkened the faces of the three men. “My first stroke shall be southerly,” said Lin Gyat, “and we will test the hypothesis. The Lotus, I am glad for a woman’s intuition in times like these!”

  Datang gave real thought to throwing her boot knife at him, but it seemed too much to strike first against a man in monk’s garb, even if that man was Lin Gyat.

  It was not long after the southerly deflection in their course that Lin Gyat and Netten heard the sound again; its subtlety was still beyond the ears of Lin Yongten and Datang. They did not correct their course northward this time, and the sound came once again, close enough that all four heard it. Lin Yongten’s eyes widened a moment, but he did not immediately speak. “What is it, Eager Edge?” said Datang.

  “The Green Morning of Imja has men who have mastered a variation on the Crane’s Migration Step,” said Lin Yongten. “At its highest level, the technique allows a boxer to run across the clouds, if he could reach them; at its next highest, he may run on the surface of a rough sea or a rapid river. Those yet less accomplished may avoid wrong-footing by sticking to still lakes and ponds; and even a novice may navigate slack ropes and young branches as though they were stone floors.”

  Datang recalled her flight from the Glib Ape and grimaced. “I think I have encountered this variation, at least at its most basic level. But how many could have cultivated such a talent, and what else might we expect of them?”

  “I have seen the technique demonstrated,” said Netten. “Emissaries from Imja are often heralded by two river runners carrying banners up the Dragon to the Orchid Palace. It never occurred to me to generalize the application. A King’s luxury, that thoughtlessness. Though I will have stern words with the King’s General as well, if ever I see him.” He thought a moment. “Left Hand, can you intuit how such a thing might be done?”

  “I assume it turns on modulating the release of rlung,” Datang replied. “It must come gently and regularly, with the footfalls, rather than in a great rush—like whittling rather than hewing wood.”

  “Yes, that is the core of it, but there are key complications. You must run on the balls of your feet, for one, which I know is not your preferred gait; the heels are too close to the great bones and rlung cannot be channeled with precision there. The soft tissues of the foot help regulate and control the power. The hands and arms will be important too, I think; they are underemphasized in the Crane’s Migration Step, but every practitioner I know uses controlled release of rlung from the hands to guide thrust and flight—even you, if perhaps unconsciously. And you will not have the moment of stillness that conventionally comes before the Crane’s Migration Step, where we coil and concentrate the power. The bamboo step will thus be more exhausting than it seems it should; you will feel out of breath, spiritually speaking. Could you overcome these obstacles?”

  “The Crescent,” said Datang, “if it means running atop the very verge of the Earthen Sky and putting a sword into a body that needs cutting? I should think so.”

  “In that case,” said Netten, “let us scheme.” And the four conferred, every eye and ear intent on the plan.

  Datang, Lin Gyat, and Lin Yongten forged south, though perhaps more slowly than before; Lin Gyat had loudly proclaimed his exhaustion, and Lin Yongten had (with a grudging air that needed no simulation) taken up the monk’s spade. Lin Gyat hurled endless commentary at him, deriding his strokes and offering various mutually exclusive suggestions.

  As though wary of what might have emerged from the conference, their herders forbore for ten minutes, then twenty. But, at last—and now they all heard it, so pricked and primed were their organs of audition—came the rustle of tension and relaxation in bamboo, and the scrape of boot soles fraying the moist new tops of the blue stalks. It moun
ted quietly as the invisible boxer approached the comrades’ path.

  Just as the whispered steps began to withdraw, Datang breached the top of the Earthen Sky like a dolphin, her straightsword leading in a silver arc. She hung for a moment’s fraction as though suspended on a column of dry blue leaves, severed by her leap and caught up in her wake. In that sliver of a moment, she looked down from the apex of her leap and saw a brother of the Green Morning, his own straightsword at his side, goggling up at her with a wide-open mouth full of unusually clean and even teeth. The crow brassard of Imja adorned both biceps; the brother also had a convict’s face-tattoo, though Datang was not sufficiently familiar with the penal codes to identify the offense.

  The bamboo-runner faltered a shade in his step, then vanished into the Earthen Sky as though the very ocean had swallowed him up.

  The plan had not failed to anticipate this eventuality; Datang plunged after him, seizing the very top of a stalk of young bamboo with her empty hand and using it to control her progress. She detected the brother’s green garb just before she connected with the grey earth; he was darting southward through the bamboo, picking his way among the stalks, doubtless to avoid detection from above. But Datang was at least as nimble as her prey, and more slender; the chase was comically slow, but she was gaining ground, and the occasional flash of his eye-whites backwards said he knew it. His legs tensed, and then he flashed upward like a green-fletched arrow.

  Datang shouted “Aiya!” and followed, and saw what the brother saw: A wild-maned figure all in black, coordinating his leap with the brother’s to land as lightly on the top of the Earthen Sky as he might on the most well-joined pavilion, the deepest-rooted mountain, like a cleaver severing the hope of southern escape.

  The man quailed, to be sure; who would not? But he was a brother of the Green Morning and an adept of the Crane’s Migration Step, a bamboo-stepper to the Earthen Sky of Imja, and if he did not trust his one sword against two foreigners, he would trust his talent. And so he ran, and Netten and Datang followed.

  Here permit me to recuse myself for a moment from the breathless, fragmented cognitions of Datang, whose every minim of effort was devoted to keeping her legs in motion and maintaining the requisite ebb and flow of what you mortals quaintly insist on terming rlung. For although Datang felt the weight of lead in her lungs and the taste of iron in her throat, although the stream of her perceptions was battered into droplets by the pain of this new exertion, although her strides felt like nothing so much as those of a lurching drunk wrenching himself from the verge of ruin with each footfall, the greater truth is expressed by the warrior-poet Durgchen, styled the Bulbous Horse, in his description of a much earlier engagement:

  Like mayflies on a pond

  Men etch seams across the sky

  Wooing blood with steel.

  Notwithstanding his martial style (itself of dubious provenance), the Bulbous Horse himself was more famous as a poet than a warrior, and had grown so huge by the time of this composition that he could barely walk, much less leap atop a fifteen-foot stalk of bamboo; still, he captures the beauty of the Bamboo Step compactly and completely. The nature of the Earthen Sky mandates constant motion, perpetual exercise of the Bamboo Step; any flagging and the would-be runner will find him- or herself swiftly swallowed by the grass. The unfettered sun shone hungrily from clean steel; the brother’s green and Netten’s black could not have been chosen better for harmony with the cerulean grass if eight royal portraitists had collaborated on the choice. Datang’s strange impression of serenity overlaying the agony of her efforts was, thus, far less mysterious than the fury of her body would make it seem. The only features that rose above the bamboo were the towers of Dzangbo (now taller and more numerous than they were when Datang stepped into the bamboo) and the single watchtower of the Duke’s estate; for the rest, the landscape was marked only by the Bat Mountains to the east, the Cradles to the north, and to the east and south nothing but the horizon.

  Thus, when two more figures with green boxer’s jackets and black crow brassards approached the chase, all three warriors saw them as specks from far away. Netten and Datang shared a look, and in wordless agreement the five warriors entered a graceful, inward-curling spiral, swords held behind them like gleaming remiges on the inside of the whorl, leaving the cut tips of blue bamboo-leaves as a wake.

  Netten was the first to disrupt the smooth contours of their flight, throwing white shards to pierce the shoulder of one of the new assailants. He was not accustomed to sighting a moving target while running himself, and many of the shards flew wide—but one found its mark, and the hit was enough to send the man under the bamboo. The other two were close enough, now, that Datang could see the fear in their eyes—but then Netten’s foot, descending from his leap, faltered, and he followed the crow-brassarded brother, and the fear left. They converged on Datang, grim and resolute.

  She leapt over them, leaving a stinging cut on the original brother’s arm that severed his crow brassard, then turned—sharply yet, somehow, smoothly—to face them before they could do the same, so that by the time they brought their swords to, she was almost on them. The new man parried her stroke, but the advantage was hers again on the next pass: Her turn was tighter, her recovery swifter. She was smaller and lighter; she might be exhausted, pulsing blackness beating back her sight’s periphery, but in a fight where the ground’s evanescence made a press impossible, she had the upper hand as long as she could keep from falling.

  On the next pass, she swerved at the last moment to move between her two opponents rather than over or to the side. She left the ground, briefly, much like Netten had, and in the same motion fanned her sword up in Clearing the Spider’s Web. She felt it cut, pause, then release; when she turned, her enemy was gone, his only trace a patch of red flecks on the tops of the bamboo. The original brother, now lacking his crow brassard, stared at her with wide, death-seeing eyes, and turned to run.

  It was only wishing for Netten’s ranged attack that caused her to wonder what had become of the wild-haired freeman. The wish and the wondering vied for supremacy—for, although Datang loved Netten and feared he had come to harm, she was not unconcerned for her own skin either, and she could feel herself coming to the limits of her wind. In her strain to keep up with her opponent, she did not notice the steps (they were, in fairness, breeze-light and cloud-silent), nor even, for a moment, the very presence of the lean, looming stranger who ran beside her. But that was only for a moment; soon enough, Datang detected that new presence, a swift spectre in white fur and black leather after the style of the old nomads, face patterned in paints of those same colors. “Leave off,” said the black-and-white stranger, “you are defeated.”

  Datang’s response was to throw out her sword to the left side, sending her body into a roll that, she realized only in mid-air, meant disaster. The sword failed to bite, and she caught a brief glimpse of the stranger nearly hanging in the air, unarmed, great black crow graceful and yet ugly on the white silk. Then Datang’s hand extended to catch herself, and she broke through the surface of the bamboo, swallowed up in cerulean.

  She grabbed for a stalk, but the one she chose was too slender and it bent, then kinked, slowing her fall barely at all. Wide-eyed and desperate now, she grabbed for another, but the great white and black form broke through the canopy of the Earthen Sky with a stormcloud-grey staff pointed at Datang like a spear. The butt of the staff hit Datang in the belly, folding her around it like a clothespin; the breath flew from her lungs and, with it, the straightsword from her hand. She and the black-and-white warrior fell together, joined by the staff, for what seemed like minutes, and Datang was afraid she would be speared when they hit the ground; but the black-and-white warrior took hold of a thick stalk and spun gracefully around it, spiraling to the ground as Datang watched in fascination. She was lucky enough to hit a sturdy stalk with her back, then, and despite the wind flying once more from her lungs, she had the presence of mind to grab the thing with every lim
b she could bring to bear, hitting the ground hard in a cloud of feathery blue leaves.

  When Datang’s vision returned, the staff was at her throat. Annoyed, she brushed it away with an arm parry and dove straight for the black-and-white warrior with Dragon Faces Down the Thunderhead, but somehow the staff came between them again, landing with crushing force on her arm and leaving a great sting as it whipped away.

  “You are defeated,” the black-and-white warrior said again. Datang noted with some surprise that it was a woman; then the realization came to her. “The Giant of the Grass,” she said.

  The warrior nodded. “The Ape’s Left Hand, I presume. I had not been told you knew the bamboo step.”

  “I improvised it, with a friend’s help. Why assail you me?”

  “I know your ‘friend,”‘ said the Giant. “A client of mine wishes an audience.”

  “This is a costly way to ask it.”

  “The client worried that a direct request would have been costlier.”

  “I do not see how that can be. One of your men lies gutted; another has taken a shoulder wound.”

  “To be sure; but, you see, a direct approach invites a direct refusal. A direct rebuttal would then have been required. And at that point, well…” The Giant shrugged. “A surfeit of directness often leaves one in no shape for an audience.”

  “You say I am defeated,” said Datang.