Free The Reluctant Swordsman by Dave Duncan Page A

were eyeing the pilgrims in a bored fashion, periodically making comments, usually about the women.   The boy glanced disapprovingly at Wallie. “Your sword is crooked!” he snapped.
    “It’s top-heavy,” Wallie complained, adjusting it back to vertical.   “Yes, but there’s a knack for keeping it right. Only Firsts go around straightening all the time.” He sounded annoyed.   “Well, I’m only a beginner!”
    The boy stamped his foot. “You don’t need to look it.” Wallie had not asked to go mad. “Let’s cancel the whole planet, and I’ll go back to chemistry.”
    The boy shook his head. “You can live here or die here. The sooner you accept that, the better. Well, follow the next group of pilgrims in, and the guards won’t see you.”
    That was absurd, for the groups seldom numbered more than a dozen and Wallie had seen no one as tall as himself. “The hell they won’t,” he said.   “Does it matter?” the boy asked triumphantly.
    Wallie glared at him. Did it? For a delusion, this world was incredibly detailed, from the cold filth coating his toes up to the insects that buzzed around his head.
    And the sunlight reflected most realistically off the hilts of the swords on the guards’ backs.
    “It wouldn’t matter anyway,” the boy said. “They would salute you. When you didn’t return the salute, they ought to challenge—but they wouldn’t dare. Not a Seventh.”
    “Four of them wouldn’t dare?”
    “But which one goes first?” The boy chuckled. “Come on! Let’s go.” Wallie stepped in behind a group of eight pilgrims, six men and two women—one Fifth, four Fourths, and three Thirds. They ambled across the square, while he watched the guards carefully out of the corners of his eyes and tried to ignore prickles of apprehension. As they reached the arch the guards looked over the pilgrims and one made a vulgar comment about one of the women being pregnant; but their eyes never seemed to touch Wallie, and he walked unchallenged into the temple grounds.
    “You were right, Shorty,” he said. Then he looked around in surprise. The boy had vanished. He was on his own.
    †††††††
    Wallie followed the pilgrims’ leisurely stroll along a smoothly paved road. He marveled at the change from the squalid huddle of the town to a parkland of velvet lawns and precise beds of flowers, under high, soothing shade trees.   Like the horses, the vegetation seemed almost Earthlike but not quite. He was no botanist and could not find the exact wrongness in anything. Bushes of bougainvillea flamed in orange and purple next to scarlet hibiscus. Palms like pillars soared to fondle the indigo sky. There were formidable buildings hidden in the distance behind acacias and eucalyptus trees; a couple of them looked like dormitories, but some were marble-faced houses. Here were the elite of the temple, flaunting their power next to the town’s poverty, and cosseted by their slaves, for he could see many little brown men in black breechclouts grubbing at the roots of things, scything grass, and carrying bundles. He was nauseated at the injustice, finding that he was having more and more trouble remembering that this was all a figment of his own subconscious.   Two elderly women in blue silk gowns were standing in conversation and they looked up in surprise at the sight of him. He placed his fist on his heart as he went by, but that seemed only to increase their surprise. Almost certainly they would be priestesses, and he was obviously not invisible to them. The word would be out, then, that a swordsman of the Seventh had arrived. Does it matter?   Uneasily he was reacting as though it did. He speeded up and went striding forward to overtake the pilgrims, hearing them exclaim in alarm as he went by.   His road was clear, winding ahead through the trees and around buildings and across lawns; the intersecting roads were obviously minor, and there were blobs of pilgrims strung out in front of him.