Keils himself seemed confident and calm, though with that necessary edge of sky-high ‘wareness he would need if he were to triumph here—as triumph he must. For though he was by far the more skilled warrior in this match, anything could happen in the fior-comlainn; and though we had, as was our right, studied Errian in practice-session as hard as he had studied Keils, still and all we knew but little of his true skill and resource in the ring. But I kept my fears firmly hidden, and knew well that every other soul here was doing just the same.
At last Keils was accoutered to his satisfaction, and the moment was upon him and all of us. He embraced each of us Companions, with a quiet word to each and from each in turn, then looked at me and knelt for my Druid’s blessing.
And a strange, not altogether unexpected thing happened then: As I laid my hands upon Keils’s bent dark head, and called upon those gods who might best be expected to lend their strength to such a task as his, and to the lightness of our cause, I was all at once aware of some Other present, who worked with me, and through me, who enveloped my body and being like an invisible mantle. And I gave myself up with joy and faith to it, and to him: For Fionn the Young, it seemed, had business here this day as well…
Outside in the compall, Keils went with Ferdia, who carried the three claymores the law allowed, to the center of the ring where Errian and Rannick already awaited them. The rest of us took our places in the first tier of seats, and I cast an anxious glance over at Gweniver, where she sat under heavy guard, and not a Fian there but who plainly and visibly hated the duty. She looked a touch paler than usual, her hair loose in a dark cloud, and she was clad in the unadorned royal blue of the House of Don—a statement if ever there was one. She was completely composed; but she never once took her eyes from Keils where he stood below, and he for his part had never once raised his own glance to her.
Reassured, if that is the word I want, I scanned the tiered galleries to ascertain the mood of the watchers. As expected, few of the plain citizenry of Keltia were here to witness this world-shattering event, though of course the time and place were known to everyone, and crowds had gathered—kept to a prudent distance—in the Great Square outside.
Most of the faces turned to the ring like flowers to the sun were faces well known to me, therefore—and well disposed at least to Keils, if perhaps not entirely so to his cause. For I saw with a sinking heart that Marguessan’s poison had been at work even here in the place where truth had come to be tested… and for the first time I began truly to fear that test.
Below us, the pre-bout formalities were being scrupulously observed, for no one wished to be held accountable later—whichever way this thing went—for lapses in lawfulness. The combat judges had entered (though not introduced to the combatants, and they had been approved by both sides for their neutrality); last-minute ministrations of water and advice to the fighters were being given, and now the Taoiseach of Keltia rose in her place to read aloud the scroll of charges.
Tarian Douglas had perhaps never in all her years as First Minister to the Crown had so difficult a task as this. But only those who knew her best could see her anger and her pain; the rest saw only the calm countenance, heard only the clear, even, expressionless tones. Gweniver’s face did not change in the least degree during the reading-out of the charges and sentence, though when Tarian finished and bowed pointedly to her—the loving act of a longtime friend here, a declaration of public and private support, by no means part of the usual order of this sort of thing—she gave the Taoiseach the flash of an expression too small to be called a smile, the hint of something like the thought of a nod.
Now Keils and Errian stood forth to hear the chief judge’s brief as to the rules of the combat; being as this fight was to the death, there were no rules to speak of. Nor were the fighters armored, save for studded leather vambraces on their forearms and a sort of half-glove with a patch of mail across the back of the hand and a stout, though flexible, leather palm-piece. These they now pulled off, and clasped forearms in the traditional gesture, then chose each a sword from the other’s armory of three, the preferred length and weight and reach having been supplied beforehand to the seconds. This choosing was in fact an ancient safeguard against treachery: You are not likely to poison the blade you know your opponent is going to be using against you. And putting aside all those intolerable possibilities of bluff and antidote—against which chance a drench was administered to each fighter that would negate any immunity to poison—so were these contests kept honest. Any road, the list of suspects in event of treachery would be an extremely short one.
The claymore is an impressive and difficult weapon: Almost as tall as its wielder, bearing cross-hilts like steel wings and a blade that could cleanly cleave an oak sapling without losing its edge, this great sword is seldom chosen for such contests, the simple reason being that few indeed can wield it to effect. In battle it is different; but in fior-comlainn the usual aim is first blood or disablement, not slaughter.
But not so today. Errian’s choice of the death-fight had made strategy all but irrelevant: The two in the ring would be observing no niceties of swordcraft but would be bent each from the first exchange on the utter destruction of the other. So as Keils and Errian took their prescribed stances either side of the dueling line, I drew in one exceedingly deep breath, let it out all at once, closed my eyes and did not open them again until I heard the fight begin. And then, of course, I could not look away.
In claymore fighting, unlike most other sword disciplines, you have little strategy but wish to go straight for whatever will soonest disable your opponent at least cost to yourself: torso blows from the start, but if the defense is too good for you to get through often enough, or at all, then you go for arm and leg blows, to disable and handicap before you get your chance to kill. It is not a particularly subtle form of combat; in essence, you try for whatever you think you can hit, and the bouts are quite short by comparison with other forms—twenty minutes at the outside. Longer innings are simply too exhausting: At the end of a half-hour combat, the two wielding claymores would be too weary to drag their swordpoints up out of the dust of the ring.
Also a secondary weapon is customary, and today Errian and Keils, should the fight get so far as that, would be using curtal-axes, the deadly little short-axe or tuagh, which each carried upon his belt at the back. There would be no respite, neither for water nor for wounds; as Ferdia put it, what would be the point? This thing was to the death.
It became very apparent very quickly that we had rather underestimated Errian of Kerveldin as a sworder. Plainly he had downplayed his abilities in all those practice sessions over the last three days, to throw us off our guard; but I consoled myself with the thought that even if he had done so, Keils had done so still more. Besides, they had not called him Keils of the Battles for mere flattery’s sake.
And it was also plain that Keils had lost none of that skill over the years of peace. I leaned forward, spellbound, almost forgetting the desperate gravity of the thing, caught up instead in its terrible beauty. There can be a kind of bardery in steel, a music in the way of the sword: timing, pace, tempo, phrasing even, the strokes set up as clean and neatly delivered as the notes of a tune. Keils seemed to move to a music he alone could hear; was it the sword that moved him, or he the sword?
All the same, it was Errian drew first blood. The crowd gasped as if itself had felt the blow, though Gweniver remained impassive; gods alone knew what it cost her to do so. Keils took the wound calmly enough, altering his patterns to fight around it, drawing Errian’s defensive returns all to one side, then coming in hard from the other without warning.
They had been fighting perhaps ten minutes now, and bled on both sides. Errian’s strokes were coming wilder and more uncontrolled, and that was one kind of danger, while Keils’s were ever smaller and sparer and more economical, and that was another kind. To my eye it looked just about even, and that seemed to me good; but the look on the faces of better fighters than I
—Alannagh, Betwyr, Ferdia—suggested that they saw something very much other, and that it was not to our joy.
Even I could tell that they were fighting much more slowly now than at the bout’s outset, in an irregular rhythm that spoke volumes for their endurance as well as for their pain: cut, breathe breathe breathe, step back for purchase and leverage, breathe, swing and cut again, take the shock of the parry, breathe breathe, cut cut cut… It was all edgework with the claymores, all arm-and-backwork for the fighters. Though Keils’s strokes were mightier, and appeared to be having greater impact, Errian’s looked to be better planned and placed; more of a pattern to his blows, where Keils strung single strokes together, each effective but each apart from the last and the next. And even I knew that it was not thus that duels are won.
They were both badly cut about by now; Errian had taken more hits but Keils’s wounds were the graver, his tunic dyed with blood. Yet still they fought on, as though none of it mattered in the slightest, and I knew we were seeing something out of which legends would be spun in after times.
Then, as Keils landed a fearful swipe, Errian parried strongly; something changed in mid-blow, and Keils staggered a little as he put a nick into the leading edge of his blade perhaps halfway down its length. A groan went up from the crowd, and Errian seized the advantage, laying in another blow at once in just the same place, and this time Keils’s claymore broke cleanly and finally across, two feet below the quillons.
The watchers in the galleries gasped as one—even Gweniver’s iron composure slipped, and all her anguish showed an instant on her face before the mask was back in place—but just then Keils Rathen proved before all Keltia what had won him his name and fame in battle.
To me, staring, not daring to breathe, it seemed that it all happened in slow-time, years even, though well I knew it was a matter of mere seconds. But as Errian began to swing what he clearly intended should be the deathblow, Keils coolly put up his left arm to block it as it fell. The tiniest miscalculation of angle or force and the huge blade would have sheared straight through his shoulder and not have stopped until it reached his ribs: But Keils had timed his move to martial perfection, had used his metal-studded leather vambrace to make the parry, turning his arm so that Errian’s blade slid along the bit of armor. The edge sliced through leather and flesh alike, but the blow was turned; and with his other hand Keils flung the hilt-shard of his claymore straight into Errian’s face. His left hand moved past the parry, and, protected only by the leather of the palm-piece, closed upon the langets of his opponent’s sword and ripped it from Errian’s grasp.
A move worthy of Cuchulainn, of Fionn himself, worthy of a song on any battlefield—Alannagh and Betwyr were thumping each other in their jubilation—and one that bought Keils just enough time to reach calmly round his back and pull his curtal-axe from its belt loop.
Faced with an axe-armed adversary and an unretrievable claymore, Errian did the same, and now the whole tenor of the fight changed. I for one could not believe they were still on their feet… But no more long sweeping graceful strokes; now it was short savage swipes, hack and slash, no style or finesse about it. They were fighting now as they would have fought in battle, and anyone watching could see that it would all be over very soon now, and I began to armor myself up against the worst.
For, unbelievably, again the luck turned to Errian: Hooking the tip of his axe under Keils’s cutting edge, he jerked hard just when Keils was resetting his grip on the shaft. The axe flew through the air, to land a few yards away, and now Keils was weaponless altogether.
He did the only thing you can do in such case: He went straight for Errian, under the wicked flashing edge of the axe, taking a frightful slice all down his left shoulderblade, but getting his hands on the haft, just above Errian’s own.
They stood toe to toe, breast to breast, face to face, and the axe between them, their fingers fighting for purchase on the blood-slick wood of the handle. A moment so; then Keils was swinging the tuagh in one last two-handed arc. I did not watch the deathblow; I was watching Gweniver instead.
Her face crumpled like a child’s, and in a rare moment of unbridled emotion she closed her eyes and raised a hand to her mouth. But her relief was all for Keils, not for herself; he had won her acquittal, but what mattered most to the High Queen of Keltia was that her champion yet lived.
Though only just: Keils raised the curtal-axe about an inch in token of victory—all he could manage—and the judges signalled their acceptance of his triumph. With that we were free to dash down to him where he stood upon the field, too weary and bewildered to move. Ferdia was first, then the rest of us, and then Gweniver came, weeping as I had never seen her weep before, or since either, for that matter. And we had brought healers, and bore Keils from the ring; though I stayed behind with Tarian and Grehan to make sure that the verdict was down and Gweniver cleared along with Arthur and Morgan.
"All charges against all named parties are dismissed," said Tarian, her glass-blond hair disarrayed where Grehan and I had mussed it in our delight. "Keils is—well enough?"
"The healers say aye," I said, unable to conceal my own reaction. "Only he could have done it, I think—"
"No ‘think’ about it," said Grehan fervently. "I have never seen nor heard of such a contest. But—"
"Aye," I said with a grimness. "But."
Grehan’s ‘but’ was no more than what we all had known must come next should Keils succeed (in our terror, we had not very much considered what should be if he had failed): the tracking to its lair of the source of Errian’s actions. We were all agreed it was Marguessan; what we were not yet sure of was how to go about proving it, or for that matter what she had had in mind by going after Gweniver and Keils. Hence, my upcoming spy turn; and there was still no word from Arthur or Majanah or our own fleet as to the rescuing of Donah.
"Ah Goddess! One calamity at a time!" cried Gweniver at supper that night. But she laughed as she said it, and we laughed to hear her.
Keils had been attended to first of all, brought from the field to Turusachan and surrounded by the best healers in Keltia. "I wish Elenna had not gone with Arthur," lamented Tarian. "For so great a general, she is still the finest healer the Companions have ever had, and who better than our own for our own?"
Still, the unCompanion healers did well indeed, though they were more dour than most of their kind, grudgingly allowing as to how Keils would most likely live as long as anyone might be expected to do who had been sliced about as badly as he. Keils himself, when Gweniver and I sneaked in to visit him for a quick moment, seemed cheerful and much more confident than those who attended him, and laughed at us for fearing as we had. But Gwen spoke to him a few moments more, alone, her head bent close to his, whispering into his ear as he drifted off again, and I had to turn away lest I learn too much for my own peace of mind.
But now that we knew the hero of the day was comfortably settled, and the mending process well begun, we could surely allow ourselves a small celebration supper, a bit of sheer relief before turning sword in hand again to confront the next set of troubles forming to crash against our battered battle line. So we gathered in Ygrawn’s private feast-chamber—just the kindred, blood-kin and soul-kin alike—and had vowed in usqua that no word of any woe, past, present or to come, should pass any of our lips at the table tonight. Tomorrow’s dan to tomorrow; this night, at least, we could be happy.
I wonder, had we known what was about to come upon us all, if we would have done aught differently. Or was it just that dan, having thrown so much, took pity on us a little before throwing so very much more… Whichever, we were grateful for that night, after. It was the last night of things as they had been, before things changed forever.
* * *
Chapter Twenty
For one who had come so close under the shadow of the sword, Gweniver seemed surprisingly forgiving, if that is the word, of the Companions (now thoroughly shamefaced) who had so signally failed to stand up for her in h
er ordeal. I am not as a rule a violent man, but I would have been knee-deep in their bloody bones by now had they done to me as they did to her. But she planned no revenge; not even to disband the Company, or banish them from it or from Keltia.
"‘Forgiving’!" she repeated with a grim incredulous laugh. "Nay, no fear! I will never forgive them until our next lives, and very like not even then. But what would you, Tal? They may be weak, or fearful, they may have fallen prey to Marguessan’s slanders, they may even be stupider than ever we thought them, or could have wished them; but they are still the Companions, and there will be other needs for them not too far off now. I did not break my toys when a lass no matter how they did displease me, and I do not chuck out my tools now however much they have betrayed me. Toys or tools, they are all I have. They will get their payback from dan; do not doubt it. I will not have to lift a finger; they will do it all themselves. And I can live with that."
I was glad to hear she planned no wholesale reprisals; and also sorry to learn she now classed as mere implements those who had been of the Company through so much.
"It is their own fault," said Morgan stone-faced. "They brought it on themselves, and I will have not hand nor heart nor part in it. Go away." She would say no more no matter how I pushed, and at last, disconsolate, I wandered off. Some time later I found myself outside the chamber Gwahanlen; I dithered a little, then pushed open the tall doors that were never locked and went in.
It seemed unchanged; and yet all had changed… It was somehow sad. I slouched down in the nearest chair and stared across the room at my own seat Gwencathra. What would I see when next I sat there, the Table in session? Would there even be a next time? Would I see a dead or disbanded Company? A broken Table? A pack of misbegotten cowardly creevies?
I shifted uncomfortably. And what would Artos think, when he got back and found out what had nearly happened in his absence? What would he do? I put my head on my hands and laid it down on the Table. Because of the Company itself, the Company that had held together since Cadarachta and Coldgates, through the first and second Llwynarths—because of the Company and what it had failed to do, Keltia had come within a touch of killing its High Queen on a lying trumped-up charge. Only Keils’s courage and sense of high justice had saved Gwen and us together—and what would Artos have to say about that? Presumably he had not yet been informed of the fior-comlainn and all that went with it, but one never knew exactly just what Arthur did or did not know and it was never wise to assume one way or the other. And we still had had no word from him as to Donah’s safety.
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