Sharps (48 page)

“Anyway,” he concluded, “Suidas Deutzel felt he stood a better chance if he left us and made his own way here. He’d made his mind up, we couldn’t talk him out of it. So he left us and we came on.”

They looked at him. “If you could show us the place on a map,” said an old man with a neat white beard, “we can send a search party.”

“I’ll try,” Phrantzes said. “But I can’t promise anything. It’s pretty flat and featureless, so really, your guess is as good as mine.”

“Did he have food and water with him?” someone asked.

“I’m afraid not. We didn’t have any either, so there was nothing for him to take.”

They looked worried; he wanted to laugh, and tell them: it’s all right, we don’t
want
Suidas found, we want him to be dead out there somewhere, and no more harm to anyone. Later he tried to feel ashamed for thinking like that, but he couldn’t. They showed him a map and he did try and make an honest guess. He could afford to, since the map meant nothing to him. “About here, I suppose,” he told them. “Somewhere around here, anyway.”

“How fast did the coach go, after you left him?”

“Hard to say,” Phrantzes replied, perfectly honestly. “Addo – Aduluscentulus Carnufex – he was driving, you could ask him. Some of the time the horses were going quite fast, sometimes the road was too rough and they were walking slowly. Someone who knows the road might be able to help you, but of course we’d never been there before.”

They quite understood and thanked him for his help, and he went to join the others in the Master’s day room. At the junction of two corridors, directly under a dazzling gold mosaic of a magnificent and entirely anonymous god, he met two of the men he’d been talking to earlier.

“There you are,” one of them said. “Good news. We’ve rescheduled the match for tomorrow night.”

Good news? Well, on balance, yes. The sooner it was all over and done with, the sooner they could all go home. All of them who survived the match, at any rate. “Splendid,” Phrantzes was therefore able to say. “That’s very good.”

“And we’ve shifted the venue to the Procopian arena,” the other one said. “It seats ten thousand, so we’ll be able to squeeze in two thousand more than if we held it here. It’s a very good arena,” he added, with a hint of pre-emptive attack in his voice. “Very fine acoustic, and it was almost completely rebuilt just last year, after the fire, so there’ll be no problems at all.”

If Phrantzes had been a horse, his ears would’ve gone back. But he smiled and nodded and mumbled, “Excellent, splendid,” and took a step forward. But they hadn’t finished with him yet.

“So all we need,” the first man said, “is your revised team.”

Phrantzes looked blank. “I’m sorry?”

“If Suidas Deutzel isn’t available,” the other one said, “obviously you’ll want to rearrange your team. I imagine one of your fencers will have to do longsword as well as his own discipline.”

Oh, Phrantzes thought. “Naturally,” he said. “I’ll discuss that with the team and get back to you as soon as I can.”

“That would be splendid, thank you.” Both of them beamed at him. “We’ll need to know fairly soon, of course, because of making the announcement. There’s a brief ceremony, nothing too arduous, but I expect there’ll be a big crowd. Shall we say tomorrow, at noon?”

As he’d anticipated, the news didn’t go down too well.

“You can rule me out,” Giraut said. “I wouldn’t fight longsword with foils, let alone sharps. No, I’m sorry.”

Phrantzes hadn’t been looking at him. He waited.

“No,” Addo said, after a long pause. “No, I’m very sorry, but I don’t think I can. Or if you really want me to fight longsword, someone else will have to do messer.” Phrantzes saw Giraut flinch out of the corner of his eye, and didn’t bother to turn his head. “And I think messer’s what they’ll be coming to see, so I’d better do that. You’ll just have to tell them we won’t be doing longsword, that’s all.”

This time, Phrantzes found himself in front of the entire Guild committee. They stared at him in silence for a long time.

“I’m afraid that’s not acceptable,” someone said at last. “I’m sorry, and I do understand how difficult it must be for you, though I do wonder why you came on this tour with no substitutes at all. Still, that’s not for me to comment on. But we must insist. Someone will have to fence longsword. I’m sure that once you’ve explained the position to your people, you’ll be able to sort something out.”

Pleading, Phrantzes guessed, wasn’t likely to get him anywhere; might as well beg the rain not to fall. “I’ll ask them,” he said, “but I really can’t promise anything.”

“We have every confidence in you,” they said, which didn’t help at all.

So he went back again, and there was a very long silence, with everybody looking away. Then Iseutz said, “But surely it’s obvious. You’ll have to do it.”

For a moment, Phrantzes couldn’t think who she was talking to. Then it hit him like a hammer.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Addo said, turning round and facing him. “Yes, that’s perfect, it’d solve everything.”

Phrantzes opened his mouth, but he couldn’t seem to get his voice to work. Iseutz was beaming at him. “We know you can do it,” she was saying, “we saw you fight Suidas, and if you can beat him, you can definitely handle some Permian.”

“For God’s sake.” The words came out high and squeaky. “I’m an old man, I’m out of training, I haven’t fought in competition for twenty years. I’ll be killed.”

Addo frowned. “I think you’re selling yourself short there,” he said. “Like Iseutz said, you showed you can handle yourself pretty well. And you didn’t just fend Suidas off, you beat him.”

Yes, but that’s because I wanted to kill him … He couldn’t say that. “It’s different in public,” was the best he could come up with, and it wasn’t really good enough. “What if they put me up against some young thug half my age and twice my height? I wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Giraut shook his head. “Longsword is all footwork,” he said. “You were moving pretty well against Suidas.”

“A big young thug is just the sort of opponent you want,” Addo said. “Muscle-bound and stupid. Work up your traverses a bit if you’re worried. And it’s definitely an advantage being the shorter man with longsword, you can close the distance and fight inside. Well, you don’t need me to tell you that.” He gave Phrantzes a reassuring smile. “As far as I can tell, the Permians are about thirty years behind the times as far as plays go, so you won’t have to worry about dealing with anything you haven’t met before. And stamina’s not an issue either, not like rapier. Keep it short and close, you’ll be fine.”

In desperation, Phrantzes tried to outflank. “Maybe if I fought rapier, and Giraut—”

“No.” Addo was completely firm, immovable. “He’s just said he’s not a longswordsman. But you are, you’ve proved it. The only other option is you fight messer and I’ll do longsword. But I think that’d be a rather bad idea.”

“And anyway,” Iseutz added, “it may not come to that. Suidas could still show up. They’ve got lots of men out looking for him. Maybe they’ll find him, and then all your troubles will be over.”

So he went to the committee and told them he’d be the longswordman. They gave him a startled look and told him that would be just fine. “In fact,” one of them said, with a strained expression on his face, “that’ll do very well. After all, we’ve promised them a Scherian national champion.”

“They always like it when someone comes out of retirement for one last match,” someone else added. “It gives the proceeedings that extra edge, don’t you find?”

They were taken to the Guild armoury to choose their weapons. It was in the basement, down five flights of narrow, winding stone stairs, worn slippery smooth and indifferently lit by horn lanterns in wall niches. At the foot of the stairs was a bronze door, which took two sets of keys to unlock and two men to pull open. Beyond the door was a vast natural cavern, lit by two shafts of light falling through glazed windows in the far-distant roof. The walls crawled with translucent limestone crusts, but “We don’t seem to have a problem with damp,” their guide assured them, “so long as we keep stuff well away from the walls.”

It was a museum, an art gallery and a temple, and a prison, and a grave. The free-standing racks were in the middle of the cavern, directly under the light, which was dazzling against the surrounding darkness. The light was good enough for reading the smallest, most worn inscriptions – makers’ names, presentations to honour victories and retirements, incantations to gods and Good Luck, bold on the spines of blades or nestling in thickets of acanthus-and-scroll engraving on ricassos or in the troughs of fullers. The longswords were stored upright, their quillons supported by pegs, so that they hung without the points touching anything, to guard against flex and set. The rapiers and smallswords rested horizontally, supported on five hooks. The messers – five messers to every longsword or rapier – sat by the dozen in buckets of black oil, like flowers in water. “Suidas would’ve loved this,” Iseutz hissed to Addo, who grinned.

“Help yourselves,” their guide said.

Addo pulled a messer at random from the nearest bucket and looked round for something to wipe the blade with. Giraut went slowly along the row of rapiers, lifting them, gauging the weight, resting them on the side of the knuckle of his left index finger to determine the centre of balance, holding them upright and smacking the blade with the flat of his hand to find the sweet spot for blocking. Phrantzes stood gawping for a long time, then took down a slim, long-handled Type Eighteen longsword, fumbled it and dropped it on the floor, jumped out of the way like a startled lamb, stooped, picked it up quickly and said, “This’ll do fine,” without examining it any further. Iseutz stared for a long time without touching, and finally chose a silver-hilted colichemarde, old-fashioned and a little heavy but very strong in the forte for binds and parries. “Are there any foils?” she asked. “You know, for practising.”

Clearly she’d said something embarrassing, but their guide was too well mannered to explain. “I believe we’ve got some,” he said, “in the salle in the east court. It’s where the juniors train,” he couldn’t help adding. “I think the under-thirteens use them.”

It was a long way to the east court. The salle smelt of sweat, wet wool and boiled cabbage, and the polished wooden floor was painted with lines and circles, neatly annotated with numbers and letters, to help instructors explain to novices where they should be putting their feet. The foils turned out to be wooden, ancient, battered, haphazardly mended with bandage, rawhide and glue. But they’d been good quality once upon a time; the weights and balances were just right, and Addo said, “That’s fine, thank you,” in a brisk, crisp voice. “Can we use this room for practising?”

Their guide looked mildly horrified. “Well, yes, if you like. But we’ve set aside the Long Hall for you. It’s where we usually hold training sessions before major competitions.”

“This will do us just fine,” Iseutz said firmly. “Could you possibly get them to send us in some food? And if you could rustle up a few masks and gloves, that’d be wonderful.”

The guide clearly didn’t trust himself to reply to such an infamous suggestion; he scuttled away, leaving them in undisputed possession of their new territory. Once he’d gone, a feeling of unaccountable calm settled over them, as though they’d really won a significant victory. Iseutz walked across the floor and carefully put her feet on 4 and 6. “This is actually a rather intelligent way of teaching footwork,” she announced, looking down the dotted lines painted on the floor. “I wish I’d had something like this when I was learning.”

“We’ve got something a bit like it at home,” Addo said, his mind clearly elsewhere. “Smaller, though.” He was picking at a lump of encrusted grease on the blade of his messer. “Top of the north tower at the country house. It’s a good room for a salle, because it’s circular and it catches the light.”

Phrantzes picked up a longsword foil, closed his eyes and took up a high back guard. Addo cleared his throat, though Phrantzes didn’t seem to hear. “Ready whenever you are,” Addo said. No reaction. He said it again.

“Excuse me?” Phrantzes opened his eyes and stared at him.

“Sparring,” Addo said. “You and me. Help get you warmed up and into the swing of it, so to speak.”

“I’ll just do a few exercises, thanks,” Phrantzes replied. He closed his eyes again, and flowed into a wide left traverse combined with a transition from front middle to high right. Addo had never seen it done better.

Giraut found a silhouette of a spread-eagled man stencilled on a wall. There were little white numbers to mark the preferred targets. He amused himself with it for a while, only thinking of a number once he’d committed to the lunge, transferring his weight to a foot hanging in mid air. He hit seven out of ten just right, and two more close enough for business. He knew that if he did another ten, he’d end up trying too hard and miss, so he looked round for Iseutz, who was playing a complex form of geometrical hopscotch with the numbers on the floor. “Fancy a few points?” he asked her. She thought about it for rather longer than he’d have thought the decision would take, then said, “All right. Actually, I need to practise passatas, if you don’t mind getting killed for a bit.”

Giraut shrugged. “Fine,” he said. “Then can we do a few voltes?”

She frowned. “You’re really good at the volte. You don’t need to practise.”

“Yes, but I like doing them.”

Addo spent some time on the eight cuts, starting slow and speeding up, but practice was making him worse instead of better, so he stopped and watched the others for a while. Giraut was making an effort to help Iseutz, who was concentrating hard and improving with each reiteration. Phrantzes, as far as he could tell, was fighting a complex and difficult battle against an unseen opponent; not just a random set of moves, there was a narrative to it, and from time to time the invisible enemy came up with something Phrantzes struggled to deal with, though he was doing extremely well. His eyes were tight shut, and as often as not his feet were landing precisely on the numbers. Addo could see two weaknesses in his style; nothing fatal, but worth mentioning. He decided to do it later, when the invisible fight was over. Assuming, of course, that Phrantzes survived.