Sharps (21 page)

“The Permians don’t use foils,” he said, raising his voice over theirs. “At least, only in practice, and for children’s matches. Certainly not at the professional level. That’s why we were sent out with sharps. That’s what we’ll be using.”

There was a long, long silence. Then Iseutz said, “They want us to fight with
real swords
?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Suidas had recovered from the initial shock. “That’s barbaric,” he said. “I’m not doing it.”

“I’m sorry, but we can’t back out now,” Phrantzes said gently. “There’s over a thousand people waiting in the square behind this one. Most of them have been there all day. If we try and back out now, there will almost certainly be bloodshed.”

“The hell with that,” Suidas thundered at him. “If we go out and fight with sharps, there’ll quite definitely be bloodshed, and I’m having no part of it. And you can tell that bastard Tzimisces—”

“Phrantzes,” Addo said, talking quietly over him and silencing him straight away, “did you just find out? Or did you know all along?”

Some questions really matter. This was one of them. In such cases, Phrantzes told himself, it’s not always expedient to tell the truth. “No,” he said. “They sprang it on me just now. They assumed we knew. I asked for foils, like you wanted me to, and they looked at me and said,
What do you want foils for
? I’m sorry,” he added. “There’s obviously been the most appalling breakdown of communications. But there’s nothing we can do about it now. You’re going to have to fight with sharps, that’s all there is to it.”

Two Permians – short, black-bearded, in white tunics and grey trousers – brought in the crate and set it down in the middle of the floor. They stared at the Scherians briefly, as if in the presence of gods and monsters, then withdrew quickly.

“We can refuse,” Iseutz repeated, yet again. “We just stand up and say sorry, there’s been a really stupid mistake, we aren’t fighting tonight. What can they do?”

Nobody answered her. Suidas lifted the lid off the crate and let it clatter on the floor. He reached inside and took out a rapier. Then a strange look passed across his face.

“Phrantzes,” he said. “Where’s the other rapier? There’s only one in here.”

“That’s for Giraut.” Phrantzes leaned across, took the rapier out of his hand and passed it to Giraut, who took it, fumbled and nearly dropped it.

“What am I supposed to use, then?”

“You won’t be fencing rapier,” Phrantzes said.

“But that’s insane,” Suidas protested. “I’m the Scherian rapier champion.”

“Yes, but rapier’s not all that popular here.” Phrantzes listened to himself saying the words, but it sounded like someone else’s voice. “What they really like is the Permian long knife, and nobody else in Scheria …’

(
Here they fight with messers. God help them
.)

“That’s totally ridiculous.” Iseutz’s voice, high and ragged. “You can’t expect him to fight a style he doesn’t know, especially with sharps. That’s just utterly unreasonable.”

Suidas had gone milk-white. He took a step back, tripped over his own heel and fell, landing on his backside. Addo stepped forward, and Iseutz shouted, “Leave him alone.”

Phrantzes felt like he was about to throw up. “I’m sorry,” he heard that voice say, “but you’ve got to. I’m really sorry.”

“This is stupid,” Addo said. “I’ll do it.”

There was a moment of perfect silence. Then Phrantzes said, “What did you say?”

“I’ll do it instead of him. Can’t you see, the poor man’s having a fit or something.”

It was as though a fist was slowly unclenching in his chest, the fingers forcing his ribs apart. “You can’t,” he said. “You don’t know …”

“I know broadsword and sword-and-buckler. How different can it be?”

“You’re fighting longsword,” Phrantzes said desperately. “You can’t do both.”

“Fine. Suidas can do longsword, I’ll do this Permian knife thing. I don’t mind. I’m quite good at sword-and-buckler.”

“There’s no buckler. It’s just the knife.”

“Not to worry,” Addo said, and with only the tiniest modulation of pitch his voice was cold and savage, admitting no contradiction. “I’ll just have to pick it up as I go along.”

Phrantzes gawped at him, then looked down at Suidas, who was still on the floor. “You can’t let him,” he said. “He’ll be killed. For pity’s sake, he’s the general’s son.”

Dead silence. Then Addo said quietly, “I think we all know that, thanks. And really, I don’t mind. Suidas can fight longsword, and I’ll do the Permian knife. Giraut can do rapier, and Iseutz can do smallsword. What are the conventions?”

Phrantzes looked at him as though he was talking a different language. “What?”

“The scoring conventions. With sharps, I mean. Do we fight till someone gets cut, or what?”

“It’s rather more complicated than that.” Phrantzes realised, after he’d said it, that if he hadn’t known they’d be fighting with sharps, he oughtn’t to know the sharps rules. “It varies from weapon to weapon. The fact is,” he said (his teeth were starting to chatter), “I’m not absolutely sure myself. They sent us a rule book …”

“They sent you a rule book,” Iseutz repeated.

“But it’s full of technical terms, and nobody really understands what they mean. Really, I need to meet with the Permian officials and get them to explain them to me.”

He found that Addo was looking straight at him; no anger, hatred or contempt, nothing as human as that. He was a source of information, and an imperfect one at that. “All right,” Addo said quietly. “You go and find someone to ask, and then come back and tell us. We won’t run away, I promise.”

After Phrantzes had gone, nobody said anything. Suidas slowly got up and walked away. Iseutz turned and hissed, “
Addo
…”

“It’s all right,” he replied, firm and perfectly calm. “My father and I fight with sharps at home.”

Her eyes went wide. “You
what
?”

“He says it’s the only way to learn. We’ve been doing it since I was seventeen, and we’ve never hurt each other. Just concentrate on your measure, that’s the main thing. If you aren’t there, you can’t be hit.”

She turned sharply away from him. Giraut happened to be in the way. “You talk to him,” she snapped. “He won’t listen to me. Tell him he’s being ridiculous.”

“Don’t look at me,” Giraut said. “I don’t want to fight anybody with real swords.”

The fury faded slowly from her face. “You’ll be all right,” she said.

“After the last time? After I froze, and you had to …”

“It’ll be all right,” she said, and it was more of an order than a reassurance. “It’s just a fencing match, right? You know how to fence.”

“Not with sharps. I could get killed. I could—”

“They don’t fence to the death,” Iseutz said firmly. “They can’t do, it simply wouldn’t work, they’d run out of fencers. It’s an
organised sport
. There’s got to be proper conventions.”

“Yes, but we don’t know what they are. It’s
dangerous
.”

For some reason, that made Suidas laugh. “And you can pull yourself together,” Iseutz said savagely. “You’re not going to let Addo fence for you, he’s never even seen one of these Permian knife things.” She hesitated. “You have, though, haven’t you? Phrantzes said—”

“It’s all right.” Addo shouldered past her without actually making contact – a wonderfully delicate piece of footwork, Giraut couldn’t help noticing – reached down, grabbed Suidas’ wrist and hauled him to his feet. “Suidas, listen to me. You’ll be all right fencing longsword?”

Suidas frowned, as though the question involved complicated mental arithmetic, then nodded.

“Splendid. That’s settled. It’s settled,” he repeated, as Iseutz opened her mouth. She closed it again. “We all know what we’re doing, and Phrantzes will be back in a minute or so with the scoring conventions, so we can think about how we’re going to do this. It’s just fencing,” he said. “We’re
good
at fencing. Nobody’s going to get hurt, I promise you.”

There was a moment of stillness and quiet; then Iseutz said, “Do you really train with your father with real swords?”

Addo nodded. “He’s very good,” he said. “He was army champion five years in a row when he was a young man. He says the only thing foils teach you is how to be a good loser.”

The first bout was single rapier. The crowd were still settling in as Phrantzes went through the local rules. It took him quite some time. When he’d finished, he said, “Have you got that?”

Giraut shook his head. “Not really.”

“Any of it?”

“No.”

Phrantzes took a deep breath. “Go for a disarm,” he said. “You can do that?”

Giraut nodded.

“A disarm will win you the match,” he said. “If you get stabbed, just stop. Don’t move, drop your sword; that ends the bout. Keep your distance.” He straightened up. The crowd were cheering the entrance of the other man. “And for crying out loud, don’t kill him. Do you understand?”

Giraut gave him a hopeless look. “I’ll try.”

“Don’t just try,” he said. “If one of us kills a Permian champion, basically we’re all dead. Do your best to win, but for God’s sake be careful. All right?”

The other man was standing in the middle of the floor. Giraut stood up. His knees didn’t seem up to supporting his weight, so he had to go forward or else fall over. He took a deep breath, but it caught in his throat. “They fence in a straight line,” Phrantzes called after him. He had no idea what that was supposed to mean.

He was a tall man, about twenty-seven years old, with a narrow face, a small nose and clear brown eyes. He wore a green shirt, with dark horn buttons. Giraut relaxed very slightly. He was happier against opponents who were taller than him, and he could see the man was nervous; there were traces of sweat on his forehead, and he was holding his scabbarded rapier tightly enough to make his knuckles stand out. He wore old scuffed shoes, which was a bad sign; presumably they were comfortable, or lucky. There were no scars on his face or the backs of his hands, which ruined Giraut’s favourite theory about how points were scored in this miserable country. As Giraut advanced to just short of long measure, he smiled: nervous, polite, well-mannered. Giraut smiled back, then pulled his face straight. The salute, he was pleased to discover, was roughly the same as at home. He made a bit of a mess of it, bringing his left hand across his body rather than level with his knee. He’d have been yelled at for that back home.

They fence in a straight line
. What the hell? Didn’t everybody?

The other man had drawn his sword and was waiting for him, but he didn’t know what to do. Somewhere in the crowd someone laughed; private joke, maybe. He guessed, and assumed a basic business guard: high first, with his feet a little too close together, leaving his chest very slightly open. Well, there was a chance the bastard would fall for it, though it wasn’t very likely.

But he did. He lunged, foot and hand together, long legs and a long arm instantly closing the measure. Giraut felt his back foot move to the right, and he twisted his body with it, watching only the point of the other man’s rapier. He saw the point go past him, and felt his wrist turn and his own sword stop, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off the end of the other man’s blade. He saw it drop and fall to the ground with a clatter like a blacksmith’s forge. He glanced down the length of his own rapier, and realised he’d stuck his opponent’s sword arm, the point passing two inches above the elbow, between the muscle and the bone, and out the other side. He dragged it clear quickly, as if hoping to get it out before anybody noticed what he’d done, and took two quick steps back.

There was dead silence. The other man looked at him: shock, fear and anger.
They don’t know about the demi-volte
. It hit Giraut like a hammer. They fence in a straight line; which means they don’t know about stepping sideways.

Somewhere a very long way away, somebody started to clap. It was a dull, thumping noise, like the sound of someone driving in fenceposts a mile away across a valley. He counted five claps, and then others joined in, a pattering, like rain on a slate roof, then a surge and a thunder, loud enough to be uncomfortable. The other man was staring at his arm – there was blood everywhere; he clamped his hand over it, and blood oozed between the fingers and dripped on the floor, splashing in fat drops. Giraut dragged in a breath. He desperately wanted to apologise, but his mouth was dry. I didn’t mean to do that, he wanted to say, I was really just getting out of the way, and I forgot the sword was sharp. At which point it occurred to him that he’d missed. The demi-volte, which he’d practised so many times he could do it with his eyes shut and still come up half-inch perfect against a target, involved a short thrust to the windpipe. He’d missed by eighteen inches. If he hadn’t, his opponent would’ve been dead before he hit the floor.

Two men in fancy robes bustled up and pulled the other man away, leaving Giraut alone in the middle of the floor, staring at where he’d been, the dropped rapier and the wet, messy puddle of blood, shameful, like a child weeing down its leg.
It was an accident
, he tried to tell them; like the other time, accident, misunderstanding, instinct. This time, though, they were clapping and shouting and whistling and waving; on the edge of his vision he could see they were brandishing flat wooden panels about eight inches square. It nearly stopped his heart when he realised they were
pictures of him
, or supposed to be, at any rate. Someone grabbed his left wrist and towed him off the floor; he walked away backwards, the tip of his rapier scraping across the black and white tiles.

“Nicely done,” said Phrantzes’ voice in his ear. “Next time, though, try and spin it out a bit, can’t you? We don’t want to look like we’re showing off.”

Iseutz was fighting a slim, dark girl a head shorter than her; irrelevantly, she was serenely beautiful, like an angel in an icon. She was also visibly terrified. Understandable, after Giraut had concluded his bout with a single pass, so quick and subtle that hardly anyone had seen it. Her arm shook as she made her salute, and as soon as Iseutz levelled into a low third guard, she skipped back three paces. Iseutz stayed exactly where she was, and for a long ten seconds nothing at all happened. Then the Permian girl started to close the measure, edging in a half-pace at a time, stopping just outside full measure as if she’d come up against an invisible wall. The strange noise that followed was actually Iseutz, clicking her tongue.