The Reluctant Swordsman by Dave Duncan Page A

brown, and skinny. He had curly brown hair and an impish face and a tooth missing. He looked about eight or nine and he was carrying a leafy green twig.   “Good morning, Mr. Smith!” His grin grew wider.   Wallie felt a twinge of relief—no more “my lord” stuff! He stayed on his knees, because that made their eyes more or less level.   “Good morning. Who are you?”
    “I’m a messenger.”
    “Oh? To me you look like a small, naked boy. What should you look like?” The boy laughed. “A small, naked boy.” He pushed himself up on one of the chairs.
    “I was hoping that you might be a doctor.” But Wallie was unhappily aware of the dirt, the insects, the smells. Hospital?
    The boy shook his head. “No more doctors. They call them healers here, and you’re wise to stay away from them.”
    Wallie sat down and crossed his legs. The stone was cold and gritty on his buttocks. “Well, you did call me ‘mister,’ so maybe I’m starting to come out of it a little bit.”
    The boy shook his head. “Last night you were speaking the language of the People. You had Shonsu’s vocabulary, which is why you couldn’t say some words that you wanted to. He was a fine swordsman, but no intellectual.” Wallie’s heart sank. “If you were really a small, naked boy you wouldn’t know these things, nor talk like that.”
    The boy grinned again. He started swinging his legs, leaning forward on his hands and hunching tiny shoulders. “I did not say that that was what I was. I said that was what I was supposed to look like! I need to convince you that this is a real world and that you were brought here for a purpose.” His grin was infectious. Wallie found himself returning it. “You’re not doing very well so far.”
    The boy raised a mischievous eyebrow. “The woman did not convince you? I should have thought that she was very convincing.”
    Peeping Tom? Wallie pushed down a surge of anger. This boy was merely one more figment of his deranged mind, so of course he knew what had happened in the night. “That was the most unreal of all,” he said. “Every man has ambitions, sonny, but there are practical limitations. That was much too good to be true.” The boy sighed. “The men of the World are even lustier than the men of Earth, Mr. Smith, hard as that may be to believe. Walter Smith is dead. Encephalitis, meningitis . . . they’re only names. There is no going back, Mr. Smith.” They all wanted to convince him that he was dead! And if he were? Who would care? No one special, he had told Jja, and that was a depressing thought. He had no roots, anywhere. No loved ones left except a sister he had not seen in ten years. If he were indeed dead, it would hardly matter to anyone. The plant would run as well without him—he had built a good team there, able to operate with no supervision. Harry would move into the corner office, and business would go on as before.
    Neddy would mourn. But Neddy’s mother had already taken him and moved back east.   It had been on a farewell camping trip with Neddy that Wallie had been bitten by the damned encephalitis-carrying mosquito . . . in an area where mosquitoes had never been known to carry encephalitis before. Neddy would mourn him but would survive. Wally had to admit that he had done a good job on Neddy. The boy was in much better emotional shape to stand the loss than he would have been three years ago, when Wallie first became surrogate father to him. Neddy was already reconciled to their parting . . .
    No! Start thinking like that and he would indeed be dead. The start of recovery was always the will to live. Remember that it was still delirium! It had to be.   He looked up and saw the little boy watching him with a mocking expression.
    “This is heaven?” Wallie scoffed. “It doesn’t smell the way I expected.” The little-boy’s eyes flickered. They were extraordinarily bright eyes. “This is the World, the World of the Goddess. The People are