Naamah's Curse - Jacqueline Carey [6]
He say, you be my peach-bottom boy, I teach you.
Thinking on it, I shuddered.
In some ways, I think it troubled me more than it did Bao. I hadn’t been raised to think of myself as a D’Angeline—indeed, I was ten years old before it occurred to me to wonder who my father was—but I had always felt Naamah’s presence in my life. The bright lady, I had called her. When the Maghuin Dhonn Herself at once accepted me as Her child and sent me forth to seek my destiny, I had no idea where to begin. So I set out to solve the only mystery I knew, and crossed the Straits to seek my father in Terre d’Ange.
I had found him, too; and as it transpired, he was one of the loveliest, gentlest souls I had ever encountered. When I was in a mood to resent my infernal destiny, one of the things I resented the most was that it had taken me away from my father so soon, when I’d scarce had a chance to know him.
The other, of course, was leaving Jehanne.
Well and so, it was done, and even on my darkest days, I could not deny there was a purpose in it. And I could not help but think that Bao travelled a similar path. He had died. His soul had travelled to the Ch’in spirit world. Because he had died a hero’s death, the merciful Maiden of Gentle Aspect had intervened to spare him the judgment of the Yama Kings. And then he found himself reborn into his body, with his soul inextricably yoked to mine and his mentor Master Lo Feng dead.
None of that was reason to seek out his marauding rapist of a father, of course. Not at all. On the surface of things, it made no sense. But I thought he would do the same thing I had done when confronted with an unwanted destiny, and set out to solve the only mystery he knew. With Master Lo dead, Bao had nowhere else to go.
Besides, I could sense him somewhere beyond me, moving farther and farther away.
If I could have followed him as the crow flies, I could have closed the distance between us more swiftly, but I was constrained by the terrain to follow the roads. Still, Bao would have faced the same constraints. In village after village I asked after him as best I could, usually with mixed results.
I didn’t have the luxury of keeping a low profile in face-to-face encounters. Bao did. A young Ch’in man travelling on his own, carrying little more than a satchel and a battered bamboo staff across his back, was not a remarkable sight. And I didn’t even know for a surety under what name he went. I knew him as Bao, but I had learned that that wasn’t a proper name, but the baby-name his mother had called him. Treasure, it meant; at least when spoken with the right intonation.
It was a name Bao had reclaimed when he cast his lot in with Master Lo Feng, abandoning the stick-fighters and thugs in Shuntian he had once led, leaving everything behind to become Master Lo’s magpie, a journey that had taken him all the way to Terre d’Ange. For a long time, I’d wondered why he’d made such a choice.
It wasn’t a pretty tale.
Bao had told me on the greatship. A young boy had come to him and begged him to teach him to fight. Bao had agreed… for the same price that the man who taught him had charged.
I don’t know how I would have responded to Bao’s tale had he gone through with the bargain. I might not have been raised with Blessed Elua’s precept and the sacred tenet of consensuality, but I was Naamah’s child as surely as the Maghuin Dhonn Herself’s, and I had taken those beliefs deep to heart.
But he hadn’t gone through with it. Confronted with the naked, shivering, stripling boy, Bao had walked away from his bargain, walked away from his life. He had taken Master Lo’s offer, an offer he had jeered at only days before, and reinvented himself.
Everything I have done in my life, good and bad, I have chosen. But this, I did not choose.
That was what Bao said the day he left me.
“Stupid boy,” I muttered to myself as I rode, not really meaning it. I tried not to dwell on it, tried not to wonder if he would be angry at me for following him. He had to know I was on his trail. He could feel