Dragon's Honor - Kij Johnson [77]
Hsiao Har stood sheepishly amid the Pearl’s pink pillows. The girl stared at her feet, unable to meet Beverly’s eyes. The chief medical officer of the Enterprise scanned the entire room from where she stood, but her quick inspection only confirmed the awful truth: Hsiao Har was alone.
The Green Pearl was gone.
Chapter Twelve
“THE SLOVENLY GARDENER grows more fruit than two hundred vegetarians,” Meng Chiao recited. “Energetic is the goblin that fears the turquoise wallpaper.”
“If you say so,” Riker said. He threw his cards facedown onto the floor, then leaned forward to rake a large stack of gold coins toward him, adding them to an already impressive pile of Pai currency. He had been doing well tonight, perhaps too well; it was starting to get awkward and a bit embarrassing. “Thank you, gentlemen.”
His hand brushed against his cards, flipping them over. Lord Li Po, whose deal it was, picked up the cards, then paused. “Hold!” he said indignantly.
“What is it?” Riker asked.
“These cards were no good,” Li Po declared. He spread them faceup on the floor, revealing nothing more than a paltry pair of threes.
“They weren’t, were they?” Riker grinned. “But you bought it.”
“You lied?” the Heir said. “You took our gold on a falsity?”
“Ah,” Riker said, abruptly catching on to the mood of the party. The other players no longer looked amused; in fact, he became acutely conscious of the fact that he was currently surrounded by over a dozen Pai warriors who had each had too much to drink. For the first time in hours, he wondered what had happened to his phaser. “It’s not a lie in poker,” he insisted. “It’s called bluffing.”
“It looks like a lie to me,” Li Po said. He had seemed like an amiable sort before, but now Riker saw the cold steel beneath the man’s pleasant exterior. Li Po was, after all, undoubtedly a veteran and survivor of the recent civil wars, as were all the other men in the Heir’s outer harem.
“A pickled skunk is not so black as the cat of a dissolute scribe,” Meng Chiao added grimly. Riker still didn’t know what he meant, but he got the tone easily enough. Meng Chiao was ticked off.
“I said nothing to you about the value of my hand,” Riker explained. “I only continued to bid until each of you folded. You drew the conclusion that my hand was worthwhile.”
“But,” Chuan-chi said, fixing an icy gaze upon Riker, “you made no effort to disabuse us of the notion you knew we would be forming.”
Riker shrugged in what he hoped was a disarming manner. “It is one of the tools of the game.”
“It is hardly honorable,” Li Po said. “Only a landless peasant would bluff.”
“Trapped in a tunnel, a copper bell never rings,” Meng Chiao agreed.
Riker was starting to wish he’d left with the Second Son. “That is not precisely the case,” he said, thinking furiously. “To bluff is to permit the other person’s errors to defeat them, just as you would not inform an opposing general of his mistakes when setting out his forces for battle—”
“That has happened several times!” Li Po protested. “Two thousand years ago, Lord Shen Fu did precisely that, preferring to win against his opponent’s best attempt.”
I don’t believe this, Riker thought. “Did the general take his opponent’s advice?”
“Certainly not,” the Heir informed him. “It would have been dishonorable to go back on his battle plans at that late date, merely because of an adverse opinion. He was quite utterly destroyed.”
“Seven thousand perished,” Lord Li Po added.
“A nightingale’s footprints are deeper than the ghost of a star,” Meng Chiao explained.
Despite the anti-intoxicating effects of Dr. Crusher’s infusion, Riker felt his head spinning. A man could go crazy, he decided, trying to sort out the Pai’s confusing codes of honor. They seemed to take honor as seriously as a Vulcan regarded logic, and to just as absurd an extreme. “Look,” he said. “What about this then? If you have an inferior force, would you wish to announce it to your opponent?”
“That would be quite unnecessary,” Chuan-chi said. “There is