Sword Sworn-Sword Dancer 6 by Jennifer Roberson Read Free Book Online Page A

do; and the next night
    we'd be in Julah where they'd eat well.
    Our dinner consisted of dried cumfa meat, purple-skinned tubers, and flat, tough-crusted
    journey-bread. Del drank water, I had a few mouthfuls of aqivi from the goatskin bota. Sated, we
    sprawled loose-limbed on our bedrolls and digested, blinking sleepily up into the deeping sky as the first
    stars kindled to life.
    "That," Del observed after amoment, "was one huge sigh."
    I hadn't noticed.
    "Of contentment," she added.
    I considered it. Maybe so. For all there were risks attendant to returning South, it was home. I'd
    been North with Del once, learning what real forests were, and true mountains, and even snow; had
    sailed to Skandi and met my grandmother on a wind-bathed, temperate island in the midst of brilliant
    azure seas, but it was here I was most at ease. Out in the desert beneath the open skies with nothing on
    the horizon but more horizon. Where a man owed nothing to no one, unless he wished to owe it.
    Unless he was a slave.
    Del lay very close. She set her head and one shoulder against mine, hooking ankle over ankle. And I
    recalled that I was man, not child; free, not slave. That'd I'd been neither child nor chula for years.
    I remembered once telling Del, as we prepared to take ship out of Haziz, that there was nothing left
    for me in the South. In some ways, that was truth. In others, falsehood. There were things about the
    South I didn't care for, things I might not be cognizant of had Del not come along, but there were other
    things that meant more than I expected. Maybe it was merely a matter of being familiar with such things,
    of finding ease in dealing with what I knew rather than challenging the unexpected; or maybe it was that
    I'd met and overcome the challenges I'd faced and did not wish to relegate them to insignificance.
    Then again, maybe it was merely relief that I was alive to return home, after nearly dying in a foreign
    land.
    I grinned abruptly. "You know, there is one thing I really miss about Skandi."
    Del sounded drowsy. "Hmmmm?"
    "The metri's tiled bathing pool. And what we did in it."
    "We can do that without the metri's bathing pool. In fact, I think we have."
    "Not like we did there."
    "Is that all you think about?"
    I yawned. "No. Just most of the time."
    After a moment she said reflectively, "It would be nice to have a bathing pool like that."
    "Umm-hmm."
    "Maybe you can build one at Alimat."
    "I think I have to rebuild Alimat itself before building a bathing pool."
    "In the meantime . . ." But her voice trailed off.
    "In the meantime?"
    "You'll have to make do with this." Whereupon she squirted the contents of a bota all over me.
    The resultant activity was not even remotely similar to what we'd experienced mostly submerged in
    the metri's big, warm bathing pool. But it sufficed.
    Oh, indeed.
    FOUR
    THE BALANCE of the journey to Julah was uneventful, save for the occasional uncharacteristic
    display of uncertainty by the stud when the white gelding looked at him. Del's mount was a quiet, stolid
    kind of horse, content to plod along endlessly with his head bobbing hypnotically on the end of a lowered
    neck—though Del claimed he didn't plod at all, but was the smoothest horse she'd ever ridden. I wasn't
    certain I knew what that was anymore, since the stud had forgotten every gait except a sucked-up walk
    that put me in mind of a man with the runs, trying to hold it in until he found a latrine. When this gait
    resulted in him falling behind Del's gelding, which happened frequently, he then broke into a jog to catch
    up and reassert his superiority. The gelding was unimpressed. So was I.
    Julah was the typical desert town of flat-roofed, squared-off adobe buildings, deep-cut windows,
    tattered canvas awnings, and narrow, dusty streets. But there was water here in plenty, so Julah thrived.
    Opting to cool off before taking the risk of meeting other sword-dancers, we stopped at a well on the
    outskirts of town,