Contents and chapter links
Previous chapter

___I charged from my tent, already hating a man I hadn’t seen.
___I cannot see him now.
___But, I remember how I saw him, then.
___As Seifas had said: a fair man.
___He stands halfway downhill, surrounded by soldiers who seem to be wandering into position as they pass. They watch him, staring, unspeaking; he smiles to them in return, resting upon his flutewood staff, meeting them each with a nod.
___Certainly he is fair of coloring. Curly, sandy-yellow hair; a short curly beard; a brief moustache. His skin is paler than any I’ve seen; compared to Seifas, simply snow. He wears a tunic of humble wool, very clean—which raises further suspicions in me: any mere peasant would not have clothes entirely unworn by rain and mud.
___I stop at a distance to watch. A boy has pushed to the circle’s edge, unlike the other nearby vendors’ children.
___The stranger turns precisely to the boy, squinting in thought a moment.
___Then he squats to eye-level with the boy, and says:
___“I see you have a sword-jumper!”
___He sounds like Seifas, somewhat; though a higher baritone, befitting a smaller man.
___“So, can you jump a sword with it yet?” he asks.
___The boy is holding a ball, covered in elongrass netting winding into a line of strands.
___I haven’t the faintest notion what he means—jump a sword with that?!—and neither does the boy, who had begun to shrink away from the man’s attention. But, his curiosity now has much increased!
___I see some soldiers nodding; everyone seems to relax a little, yet grow more alert.
___“Did you know your ball can jump a sword?” the stranger gently asks.
___The boy is darting his eyes toward his elders.
___A soldier mutters, “S’alright, lad. Speak up.”
___He gulps, then edges further in.
___“What do you mean…sword-jumping?”
___“Well! Sometimes a fighter must dodge a swipe by jumping something swung at him! Imagine! Here—” the stranger has leaped to the right, facing left in an on-guard stance. “Here is our hero, taunting his foe to a towering rage. ‘Where shall I skewer my peacock again?!’”
___The boy’s eyes widen in wonder. Several soldiers are smiling now, but not in mockery.
___“So, the villain,” continues the stranger, leaping across to the opposite side, “snarls and savagely swings his axe or halberd, thus!” And with a looping whistle, he brings his pole around in an arc. “Striking here!” he points, and then steps back along his staff to put his legs within the arc. “But!—our hero jumps,” and once again he leaps, inventively whirling the staff beneath him, “clearing the blow—or even pinning it down! Ha-HAAA!”
___He flourishes, standing proud and straight upon the staff, flushed with exertion and grinning broadly.
___“Well,” he adds with a shrug, “any professional soldier could do it better. But, you have a lead on me,” he points to the boy and his ball, “for you can begin to learn it early!”
___The boy now shifts his excited attention, between his ball and the stranger.
___“It does work a little bit differently, with a ball,” the man allows. “I would be glad to show you.”
___And, he holds out his hand.
___The boy is hesitating. “G’wan, lad. Let’im try,” advises another soldier. I ruefully shake my head; to my surprise, I am smiling, too! The man must be a clown…
___“I understand,” the stranger nods, with a different smile. “You do have every reason to believe me. Yet to act on that belief, even once you have your reasons…it can be hard to step out onto a bridge, even when we have built the bridge ourselves.”

___I blink so sharply, my eyelids click.
___This man is not a clown! He is—! What he is, is a…!
___Don’t listen to him! I want to shout, through my clenching throat. This is a trick of some sort! Can’t they see?! Why are they all smiling now?!

___I don’t know whether the boy understands the man—but, he understands the surrounding smiles.
___With only a tremor of hesitation, he gives the man the ball.
___I force my muscles to twist into action: enough of this farce!

___A hand falls gently on my shoulder.
___I whirl, spitting, to face the threat…
___…Seifas is standing calm and tall beside me.
___“Watch,” he murmurs.

___He isn’t looking at me. He isn’t looking at me!

___My fury floods my mind, as I turn back to the gathering crowd—
___…the stranger is jumping the sword!

___Having fastened the end of the twine to his ankle, he is swinging the ball on its leash through the air, near to the ground, jumping in a stuttering step to avoid the slinging cord.
___“It works much better with a friend!” he shouts. “Then you can jump both feet! Come on and try!” And in a frolic, the boy and his friends all fling into the circle, leaping to clear the arcing ball.
___I cannot move; the sight is incredible. Whenever the children stumble, they and the man all tumble down; and then they bounce right up to try again. The children shrill and giggle; the vendors can hardly wipe the tears from their eyes for laughing so hard; the soldiers regale one another with yarns of war. Now the ring is clapping, and as the cord completes an arc, they raise a counting shout: “Ahoy! Bahoy! Chahoy! Dahoy! Eeoi!” Seifas, his long lean face the perfect picture of dignity, is laughing boisterous roars, his bright white teeth all shining…

___I didn’t laugh.
___I seethed, and was seized with a burning itch to fly down the hill, to rend the joy of those people.

___The force of that joy quelled me instead.
___I didn’t want to face it.
___I was afraid to face it.

___So I turned, and skulked to my tent.
___As far as I know, no one even watched me.

___I told myself I wasn’t retreating. Let them have their fun. I was practical. I was pragmatic. Wasn’t this partly what vendors were for?—to entertain the troops?
___I didn’t entirely succeed in ignoring the differences, of joy and fun and pleasure. But I managed not to think of it.
___No…I managed to think away from it.
___I strode into my tent, and poured a mug of mead, and sat and stewed. Even Hud had gone to join the escalating party. Fine. Whatever.

___…and then to my mind, there sprang an image of me, dancing and singing.

___How ridiculous! I had never once sung in my life…!
___—but I remembered now, that I had danced, long ago.

___I remembered: how I had danced the dances of little girls who wanted to dance the dances of women; how I enjoyed my play, how I had looked with a clean admiration—that which poisoned turns to envy—upon the girls who were finally ready to dance the very best dances.
___I had wanted so badly to dance those dances…

___I wept unblinking tears; refusing to admit that I was weeping, wanting to murder those memories.
___I hated them.
___I loved them.
___I missed them.

___But I refused to close my eyes and cry.

Next chapter

Notes from the real author…

This isn’t the last substantial subauthor chapter in the book, but it’s (almost) the last one for a while, and they’re rare afterward.

I debated a long time about whether to go back to normal narration for this chapter, but eventually I decided there was too much rumination from Portunista herself not to keep going.

The sword-jumping ball is a real toy, still available today (or anyway in 2000 when I wrote this chapter); and I based the incident loosely on teaching some kids at church what the weird toy they had found in the closet of the fellowship hall was for.

(This seems like a good time to point out that I don’t much resemble Jian. His backstory, without going into deep spoilery territory, is VERY much different from mine as well; although he’s admittedly a composition of two fictional characters I created back in the 80s, one of which was a personalized expy of myself–one of several. )

Different authorial perspectives strike again!–Seifas, who would usually be cautiously critical, never thinks to be suspicious about Jian’s clothing. This also allowed me to start to offset some of Portunista’s prickliness (still in full flower otherwise in this chapter): see, she isn’t incompetent, she has good reason to be suspicious about Jian’s clothes!

I also meant this to offset her somewhat irrational reaction to the good will he inspires in the troops. I never could think of a way to explain outright what’s really bothering her (maybe later in Book 4 I’ll get around to doing it on the page), but the root of it (indicated in the previous chapter) is that she doesn’t want competition, and especially effective competition, for authority in camp. But that would be too self-critically obvious if she thought it out loud (so to speak): “This man is not a clown! He’s–! He’s–! I dunno, but he isn’t just being silly and that means he’s a threat to me by comparison!”

Another thing she could be thinking is that, dangit, here are the klerosa starting to come back!–as established in the previous chapter, she didn’t much like them. (Also as established earlier, the ‘clerics’ or priests and priestesses routinely vanish at once before age-ending conflicts, for reasons no one knows for sure, and never come back themselves but the gods who serve God–the Agents of the Eye in Mikonese terminology–start raising up new klerosa soon afterward. Only this time that hasn’t happened and it’s starting to freak people out, though Portunista is glad not to have the competition.)

But then, she doesn’t really have any evidence he’s a man chosen by some Agent to be a cultural representative: he isn’t saying so, or talking about how Abban came to him and is granting him power and authority to help humanity in such-and-such a way, much less demonstrating any of the miraculous power of the klerosa. He just says something that sounds a little deep after acting like a mere bard! So she can’t out him as a fraud, because he didn’t claim to be anyone in the first place, and she really doesn’t have reason to believe the Agents won’t start raising up klerosa again (despite their unexplained delay), so if he turns out to be one and she opposes him the people will instantly turn against her.

Anyway. While I didn’t realize it at the time, Jian’s little saying about stepping out on a bridge one has built, has connections to something that happens at the halfway point of the book.