She spoke, asking in Jindobe, “Who approaches?” Her expression remained grave, but her low voice was courteously neutral. It was the question anyone might ask of a stranger approaching her door.
I halted. I wanted to answer her, but I could not remember my name. I felt that I had left it behind when I entered the Kidona world. I reminded myself that I had taken Dewara’s challenge in order to become Kidona. To become a warrior and gain Dewara’s respect, I had to defeat the enemy in front of me. Yet he had not warned me that the sentry might be an old woman. The part of me that was not Kidona felt shamed by the bare blade in my hand and my failure to reply to her courteous question. A Gernian soldier did not bear weapons against women and children. I felt a strong tug from that self and found myself lowering my sword. I tried to be chivalrous and yet warriorlike as I said, “The one who brought me here calls me ‘soldier’s son.’ ”
She cocked her head to one side and smiled at me as if I were very young. Her voice rebuked me gently, as a kindly old woman might recall manners to a youngster. “That is not your proper name, nor any way to introduce yourself. What is the name your father gave you?”
I took a breath and found a truth I had not previously known. “I do not think I can say that name here. I came here to be Kidona. But as of yet, I have no name in Kidona.” After I spoke, I felt suddenly childishly foolish to have confided this information to my enemy. I hardened my muscles and brought my blade up to readiness again.
She seemed singularly unimpressed with my saber. She leaned closer, and as she did so I perceived that her loose hair was snagged on the tree’s trunk, as if binding her to it. She peered at me and I felt that she looked deep inside me. In a quiet, almost confidential voice, she informed me, “I see your difficulty. He thinks to use you to force his way past me. He has made you believe that you must kill me to gain a man’s respect and standing. That is not true. Killing is only killing. The respect that Kidona will give you if you kill me is real only to him. No one else believes in it, least of all you. And you don’t have to kill me to earn true respect. My blood will only buy you that fool’s regard. I will pay a high price for you to be respected by a churl. Nothing bought with blood is worth having, young man.”
I thought about what she said. They were an idealist’s words that made sense as a lofty philosophy. But on a day-to-day level, I knew that much of my world had been bought with blood. My father often spoke of that, that our soldiers, especially the cavalla officers, had “bought the new Gernia with their lives, made these lands ours when the soils of them were watered with the blood of our soldier sons.”
“I don’t agree with you!” I called out to her, and then realized I need not have spoken so loud. Somehow I had drawn much closer to her without being aware of it. I wondered if the root path had drawn me closer, unperceived by me. I glanced around but had no way to tell.
She smiled then, an elder’s smile. “The truth doesn’t need you to recognize it, young man, for it to be so. You need the truth to recognize you. Until you do, you are not real. But let us set aside the truth of the worthlessness of things bought with blood. Let us try to recall who you are in another way. We are not defined by what we die for, but by what we live for. Will you acknowledge that truth?”
Somehow the whole situation had changed. She was testing me now, rather than meeting my warrior’s challenge. I felt that she was guarding the bridge, demanding that I prove myself worthy to cross. If I earned her regard, she would permit me passage. I did not have to be Kidona to cross.
Distant as a bird’s call on a hot summer day, Dewara’s voice reached me. “Do not talk with her! She will twist your thoughts like a twining vine. Ignore her words. Rush forward and kill her! It is your only hope!”
She did not lift her voice to reply to him. She spoke almost quietly as she said, “Be quiet, Kidona man. Let your ‘warrior’ speak for himself.”
“Kill her now, soldier’s son! She seeks to possess you!”
But like a distant birdcall, the sound of his voice seemed a territorial challenge that did not apply to me. I let his words go by me, my mind mulling over the tree woman’s words. Defined by what we live for. Was that how I defined myself? Should a soldier ponder such things?
“The same things I live for are the things I would die for,” I said, thinking of my king, my country, and my family.
She nodded slowly, like the canopy of a tree swaying in a flurry of wind.
“I see that. There is much in you that wants to live for those things. More of you wishes to live for them than to die for the Kidona man’s respect. He is the one who sends you to kill me. You do not have that quest in your true heart, but only in the heart he has tried to give you. He thinks he cannot lose. You are, still, the son of his enemy. If I die, you have served him well. If you die, he takes no real loss. But I think either death would be a loss for you. What was your real quest, soldier’s son? Why have the gods sent you to me, why have you managed to come past every trap unscathed? I do not think you are meant to die trying to kill me. There is more to you than that. You come as a weapon. Are you a weapon from the gods given as a gift to me?”
