Free Stands a Shadow by Col Buchanan Page B

Selarus, the priests working over prone forms, pumping water from lungs, breathing into mouths, slapping faces to revive them. One pair was carrying a limp form away.
    He sprinted even faster, with the effort pulling the breath from him. Ahead was a congregation of dancing pilgrims, so thick he saw no way through them. Ché wasn’t in the mood for stopping.
    With a feral grin he put his head down and charged into the crowd at full speed, shouldering the men and women out of his way. Like a raging bull he tore his way through the mass of pilgrims as men and women spilled to the ground or pursued him with their shouts of anger.
    He emerged on the other side fighting for air. His brow was wet, and when he dabbed it with his fingers they came away red.
    Onwards, with the rain gently cleaning the blood from him, the taste of it mingling with the taste of the Royal Milk in his mouth.
    When he returned to the apartment he realized he’d forgotten to bring any coins with him to get back inside the building. He cursed and pulled the doors in vain, but then the door opened from within – one of his neighbours stepping out – and Ché ducked inside.
    He jogged up the stairs and entered his apartment. Whiskers was just crossing the room and she glanced at him with a frown on her reddened features. A whistle was shrieking from behind her.
    ‘Good timing,’ he noted as he stepped past the woman, pulling off his clothing as he moved towards the bathroom and the source of the high keen. Whiskers hurried past him. When he entered the bathroom’s steamy atmosphere she was already turning off the gas flames beneath a great copper pot fitted tightly with a lid. A jet of steam was shooting from the whistle fixed in the lid, and it died quickly as Whiskers opened a spigot near the bottom of the pot, to release a flow of hot water into the tiled bath sunk into the floor.
    Naked, his mood still high, Ché pinched her rump as he stepped around her, and gave a quick smile in return for the scowl on her whiskery face. ‘You’re too good to me,’ he told her as he stepped into the few inches of water in the slowly filling bath, and lay back and sighed as it rose gently around him. Whiskers eyed him scornfully.
    He closed his eyes as his body grew lighter in the water. His skin burned pleasantly, and he heard the woman roll up her sleeves and kneel beside him. Ché sighed long and deeply as she scrubbed him down with a flannel of rough sharkskin and one of the balms his mother had insisted on giving him for his troubled skin. Methodically, she worked on the rashes that covered his body, and he groaned at one point, in something approaching sexual pleasure, at the relief it gave from his constant itching.
    This life had its benefits, Ché reflected idly. Not least of all a hot bath every day if he wished for one; no small thing that, in a world where most people were lucky to wash in a basin of cold water with copal leaves for soap.
    You’re getting soft , he thought, and wondered what his old R ō shun master Shebec would think of him now, if he’d still been alive to see him.
    Whiskers cleaned the small cut on his brow, making no enquiries either by gesture or by look. When she finished, she sluiced the water from her hands and left him to enjoy his soak alone. His mind was still clear from his run. He placed a sodden flannel across his face and breathed through its clinging embrace, feeling tired all of a sudden, the effects of the Royal Milk finally fading. Perhaps he’d sweated them out of his body.
    Ché yawned and knew he would sleep soon. His thoughts drifted like the steam in the room, and in small measures he allowed them to contemplate the bizarreness of the night now behind him, and what was to come the next morn.
    War , he thought with a sudden sobriety. Tomorrow, I set off for war .
    A letter was waiting for him on the table by the front door when he arose in the afternoon from his sleep. Whiskers was gone, returned to her slave