Sharps

by K. J. Parker

  “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.

  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.