THIRTY-NINE
By the time that Jik and Nils got back to the farm, there was enough daylight to see that the giant had been splashed with blood from scalp to feet, apparently none of it his own. It seemed he hadn’t failed them, at least not entirely.
Mrs. Wu still held little Kin, pale and tear-streaked in her arms, soothing him from the terror that had wakened him screaming in the dawn. She stared owl-eyed and pale at the man before he washed, or as nearly owl-eyed as her epicanthic eye folds allowed. And while he washed, for the display of muscles was unlike anything she’d seen before, though Wu himself was hard and muscular.
Wu poked the barbarian’s wet shoulder. “Bailiff?” Wu said, then repeated. “Bailiff?”
The barbarian bared big square teeth in a grin that fascinated in an alarming way. He clutched with his hands in a pantomine of strangling. Bailiff was clearly a word he knew now, and he repeated it as he mimed. Then he walked fingers downward through the air, as if down stairs, and pantomined the killings and the fight in the barracks.
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The blood was the only evidence for any of it, but it was enough. They did not disbelieve him.
While they ate breakfast—bread and butter, beans and curds and cabbage—Jik told his father what he wanted to do. He’d seldom been so forward before, but Wu nodded permission, even though it would lose him two more days of the boy’s labor. He hadn’t expected to see the barbarian again, and had no ideas of his own on how to be rid of this potentially very dangerous man.
After breakfast, the barbarian sat down on a bench, drew his sword, and with his knife scraped the dried blood from hilt and crossbar. Following which he borrowed a file and patiently, thoroughly, worked the nicks out of his sword before using a whetstone on both sword and knife. It took him more than an hour.
He knew all that passed between father and son. Jik would work that morning, then nap. At twilight, when the farmers along the road should be at home, the two of them would leave.
Meanwhile he himself could sleep all day, and would.
They moved briskly in the starlight, bypassed Lui-Gu through farm fields, then returned to the road on the far side of the village. Here even Jik had traveled only once before, but for several hours there was no chance of confusion, for there were no other roads.
At last they came to a crossroad. Jik pointed right and shook his head vehemently. “Emperor!” he said. “Soldiers!” Then pointed left and nodded. “Jampa Lodro!” he said. “Jampa Lodro!” He himself had never been that way, nor had his father, but the road to Jampa Lodro’s was common knowledge.
Nils nodded. “Jampa Lodro,” he said back, and they turned left.
Jik was young and lean and work-hardened, but not accustomed to hiking all night. He flagged near the end, and daylight arrived before they did. The morning was chill, and wet with dew, when they came to the Forest
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clearing with its longhouse, landscaped grounds and outlying fields. Jik knew its Sino-Tibetan name—Gomba Dorje—though not the meaning, Monastery of Enlightenment. Morning meditations were over, and breakfast, and a number of novices and monks were filing into the potato field, hoes in hand. Nils insisted on skirting the clearing to where the forest edge was very near the longhouse.
Despite the chill, Nil’s shirt was in his small pack, and as they approached the longhouse, a novice sweeping a flagstone walk stared at him open-mouthed. It seemed to Jik that the boy hadn’t even noticed the barbarian’s eyes; he was too awed by his size and muscles.
The monk who answered the door gong wore an unbleached linen robe. Clearly he was Chinese, not Tibetan, which made Jik less uncomfortable than he might otherwise have been at this holy and already fabled place. The monk noticed the barbarian’s eyes, Jik had no doubt. Actually he’d noticed more than the eyes; he’d seen the aura. He bowed slightly and the barbarian bowed slightly in return. Jik bowed more deeply. He sensed that this monk was an adept, and he’d heard stories of what Tampa Lodro’s adepts could do. Most of the stories would have set them laughing.