Sharps (22 page)

In the audience, people were blowing their noses, peeling boiled eggs, opening bottles. Someone shouted something; it wasn’t friendly encouragement, and there was a short blast of laughter. The Permian girl went bright red in the face, closed the measure with a single long skip and lunged. Iseutz parried on the back step, the Permian disengaged neatly, feinted high, swept low and was parried and riposted in coaching-manual style. It was proper fencing. The crowd fell silent.

Addo could see Iseutz was doing everything she could to keep from hitting the Permian girl. She was good; better, she was convincing. She timed and placed her attacks to force her opponent to defend in depth, keeping her own right shoulder up and forward, perfectly side on, the absolute minimum target. It was a beautiful performance but not a strategy; she was tiring the Permian girl out, because (not knowing the scoring rules) it was all she could think of to do. The Permian was clearly in two minds: she wanted to stay as far away as possible from the devil woman trying to kill her, but she’d lost confidence in her defence, so she was trying to control the bout by relentlessly attacking. He could see Iseutz itching to disengage and counterattack, practically every time the Permian came at her. It was an astonishing display of self-control, which she was having to disguise from the crowd and her opponent.

Eventually Iseutz’s tactics worked. The Permian was getting tired, dragging her feet, overstriking. Iseutz let two chances pass, presumably because she wasn’t absolutely sure. Then she closed in for a beginner’s-level disarm, flicking the sword out of the wretched girl’s hand and gently pressing her swordpoint on the side of her throat until she yelped her surrender. She’s found out, Addo realised, just how good she is. There’ll be no living with her after this.

“What was all that about?” she panted to him as she plodded off the floor, carefully not looking back at the frantically cheering crowd. “I was better than that when I was twelve.”

Addo grinned. “I can only assume they’re lulling us into a true sense of security.”

“They’re rubbish.”

“I do hope so,” Addo said. “I really do hope so.”

Iseutz tried to kick off her shoes, but they stuck to her feet. She put a hand on his shoulder, lifted one foot and slowly dragged the shoe off it. “I thought they were mad keen on fencing in this country,” she said. Then the other shoe. Then she let go of him and spread her toes on the tiles. “Who’s next?”

“Suidas,” Addo said. “Then me.”

It came to him in a flash of inspiration, in the middle of the salute. Pretend he’s a student, and you’re teaching him to fence.

That made it simple. The teacher makes the student do what he wants him to; he’s always better, always in control, but striving to draw the student out, encourage him to have confidence in himself, right up to the point where the teacher bats the sword out of his hands, trips up his feet and grins at him, flat on his back and looking up the fuller of a blade resting lightly on his neck. Confident, yes, but not overconfident. Barring some ridiculous accident, there’s never any danger of either party getting hurt, because the instructor knows exactly what he’s doing.

It made for a good show, too. Suidas made his pupil work with the edge, never giving him room to threaten a thrust, while always keeping him covered with the point, just in case something went wrong. He taught him why you shouldn’t allow yourself to be cramped up, the virtues of the close, binding style, the pre-eminence of leverage and economy of movement. He let him slash ferociously, until the edge of his beautiful Type Eighteen longsword looked like an old farm saw, then taught him a few basic lessons in mechanical advantage. When he was clearly too tired to be able to take anything else in, he drew him into a wild lunge, sidestepped and knocked him silly with the pommel as he tumbled past, on the grounds that humiliation is the best teacher of them all.

“They’re useless,” Suidas said cheerfully, slamming the longsword back in the case and collapsing on to a bench. “And the crowd love us. Listen to that, will you?”

Addo was listening, but he was inclined to put a slightly different interpretation on the vast noise behind him. It had changed just a little since Suidas made his fancy bow and stalked off the floor, while stewards dragged his unconscious opponent away. They don’t care about rapier or smallsword or longsword, he decided. That’s not what they came to see.

Phrantzes was standing next to him. He had something wrapped in a cloth. “It’s quite a good one, apparently,” he was saying. “I borrowed it from the Master of the Guild, it’s his own personal messer.”

There was something wrong with Addo’s throat; it felt tight and sore, and he wondered if it was the early stages of glandular fever. He thought about it and realised it was probably fear; the real thing, as opposed to the mild anxiety he’d lived with most of his life. And what a truly wonderful time to make its acquaintance.

Phrantzes put the cloth bundle down on the table with a bump. Addo stared at it, then pulled away the cloth; it tangled in something, and he realised his hand was shaking. The crowd was chanting something. It sounded like a name. He made a special effort, steadied his hand and removed the cloth.

It looked like a farm tool. The hilt was two slabs of unpolished wood (ash, he guessed, though he didn’t really know about that sort of thing) riveted to the tang, which was just an extension of the blade, which was about two feet long, roughly a thumb-length wide, single-edged and slightly curved. It had a clipped point, not much use for thrusting, and a false edge, half-sharp. The true edge was thin and sharp as a razor. A fine tool for hedging or sharpening fence posts, so long as you were careful how you used it. One careless slip and you could do yourself a serious injury. It made him feel slightly sick just looking at it.

“That’s a messer, is it?” he heard himself say.

“Apparently,” Phrantzes replied.

You’d have to be mad to fight with something like that; or desperate, or too poor to buy a real weapon. There wasn’t even a proper crossguard, to keep the other man’s blade from riding up in a bind and slicing into your knuckles. He could see no defences, no wards, maybe one or two extremely dangerous parries; and it was short, presumably front-heavy, so almost certainly horribly quick. And it was what twelve hundred Permians had come to see.

“I think they’re ready for you,” Phrantzes said.

He picked up the messer, but somehow it slid through his hand and clattered on the table. Instinctively he shrank back, terribly aware of the sharp edge, temporarily out of control, which would slit his flesh on the slightest contact.
Pull yourself together, for pity’s sake
; the voice in his head sounded just enough like his father to make him obey.
If you’re this scared of your own sword, then God help you when you face the other man
. He reached out and closed his fingers tight around the hilt; firm, like a good handshake, like shaking hands with the only friend and ally he had in the room.

Longsword was easy; it was
safe
. You had three feet of steel to hide behind, and both hands to guide it with. That and a good guard, and you could hold off a small army. This thing was grotesque. He looked up at Phrantzes and saw he was terrified too. He smiled. “Wish me luck,” he said.

“Of course.”

“Oh well,” he said, and walked out on to the floor.

The other man was over six feet tall, slim, broad-shouldered, with a shaven head and a badly healed scar running from his left eyebrow down to his chin. He wore a sleeveless white shirt and knee breeches, and his feet were bare. There were smaller scars on his forearms, white lines under the thick black hair, like animals hiding in undergrowth. Watching from the wings, Suidas couldn’t make out his name, even though everybody in the crowd was yelling it; something like Langros, but it wasn’t that. Standing next to him, Addo looked like a girl.

Here they fight with messers
.

He tried to look, but he couldn’t. His eyes closed, and the volume of sheer crude noise crashed over him like a wave; and he was in Permia, and he was nineteen years old, and it was raining.

Later, much later, he’d found out what had happened. The Irrigator, the greatest strategic genius of the age, had sent a squadron of cavalry to fail to capture a bridge, by way of a diversion, to draw away the Permian infantry. But something went wrong. The cavalry succeeded; they captured the bridge, and the Permians withdrew their infantry back down the road, along which the Irrigator, expecting it to be empty, had sent a supply convoy.

It hadn’t mattered, because as soon as he realised what had happened, the Irrigator sent three hundred dragoons to deal with the Permian infantry, who were wiped out and ceased to be a nuisance. But before that …

They’d driven straight into them. It was a comedy. The Permians took them for their own wagons, they took the Permians for their own auxiliaries; it was only when they were close enough to see the rank emblems on the officer’s tunic facings that the convoy realised something was wrong, and if they’d kept their heads and just kept on going, they’d probably have got away with it. But some idiot with a bow shot an arrow. The Permians looked stunned, then figured it out. The Scherian carters were armed, after a fashion. There was a very short fight.

He’d done the right thing, to begin with. He jumped off the box of his cart and ran, which was what the old-timers had told him to do, and everything would’ve been fine if it hadn’t been for the rain, which had turned the bottoms of the ruts in the road to greasy mud. He slipped and landed on his hands and knees, and when he’d tried to scramble up, the end of his scabbard was lodged between his ankles and he fell over again; and then there was a Permian coming straight at him.

He didn’t look like a problem. He wasn’t a soldier. At that stage in the war, they were hauling men out of the mines and sending them straight to the front. He had no uniform, no armour or helmet, no spear or shield; just a short sword or a long knife. He had one boot and one bare foot – lost the other boot in the mud, most likely.

Suidas Deutzel fancied himself as a swordsman. The government had bought him a brand new Type Fifteen, which he hadn’t had a chance to use on anybody yet. The Type Fifteen was the finest single-handed sword ever issued; everybody said so. And the Permian was in the way, blocking the road. He had to go. Suidas jumped to his feet, drew his sword and composed himself magnificently into a high front guard.

The Permian kicked his left kneecap with his booted foot. He fell over.

He landed in deep mud, sitting in a wagon-wheel rut that came up almost to his waist. The sides of the rut gripped him, and the mud was too soft to give him a footing. He couldn’t move. He lifted his sword. The Permian kicked it out of his hand and it sailed away, end over end, an asymmetric curling flight into the edge of his field of vision. The Permian raised his right hand and swung. Instinctively, Suidas put his own right hand up in front of his face. The front inch of the messer sliced through the web between his thumb and forefinger. It didn’t hurt. As the Permian lifted his arm for another stroke, Suidas understood why there was no pain; he was going to die, he was dead already, there’s no feeling in dead flesh. His bladder and sphincter relaxed. He opened his mouth. The horror of the moment of death swelled up inside him, worse than any pain.

The finishing cut never came; obviously, because here was Suidas Deutzel, ten years later, still alive. The next thing he remembered was waking up on a bed in a big tent, looking into the brown, weary face of a Blueskin doctor, who’d just spent half an hour sewing his right hand back together. He remembered the hospital tent, the prisoner-of-war stockade and the prisoner exchange perfectly, every detail. After the exchange, he re-enlisted, forced his way into a good line infantry regiment and spent the last two and a half years of the war at the front. He kept score: seventeen Blueskins, twenty-three Aram Chantat and forty-six Permians. He returned home with seven bravery medals, a field commission (no pension) and a long pearwood box the size of a coffin, which took two men to lift it. At first he kept the box next to his bed; but when his drinking led to money problems and there was a real danger of the bailiffs confiscating his possessions, he left it at his uncle’s house, sealed in five places to keep the old man from temptation. Not that the contents of the box were worth anything, at least not in Scheria. In Permia, maybe: seventy-three messers, some of them barely used. He kept the rest of them in another safe place, which nobody at all knew about.

It wasn’t going well. After the first disastrous exchange, Addo concentrated on keeping out of the way. But the Permian was as agile as a cat and showed no signs of getting tired, which was more than he could say for himself. He didn’t dare wipe the blood out of his eyes, in case the Permian chopped his exposed hand off; that meant he had to squint, just when he needed to be able to see perfectly. He tried not to pay any attention to the jeering from the crowd, but it was starting to get to him, because they were quite right. He
was
a coward, he
was
scared shitless, and he was one small mistake away from the end of his life.

The Permian grinned at him, feinted left, dodged right, fooled him; at the last moment he somehow contrived to cringe out of the path of the cut. He did a backwards standing jump, nearly toppled, caught his balance just in time. The messer swished past the tip of his nose.

Pointless, he thought, and foolishly stubborn; like a chess player grimly, selfishly playing out the very end of a game when he’s down to his king and the other man’s still got his queen and both castles. But his body kept moving, the thickness of a sheet of paper away from the fast, sharp edge. He could feel his concentration slipping. It’d be so easy to give up, allow the Permian to demonstrate the self-evident truth, that he was the better man. Keeping going was dishonest, like pleading not guilty when everybody knew you’d done it.

The Permian fooled him again; he wasn’t sure how, but he saw the messer coming and knew he couldn’t quite get out of the way this time. He felt it brush against him, he didn’t know where. Instantly he relaxed, and heard the clatter of his own messer on the tiles. There was a great roar, and he slid to the ground, landing in a puddle of something. To his shame, he smelt that it wasn’t blood. Hell of a way to go.