Sharps

by K. J. Parker

  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.

  More noise, deafening, the joy of perfect strangers at his miserable undoing. Then someone was dragging him along by his feet, and he was still alive.

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Phrantzes was saying. “Everybody loses sooner or later.”

  An Imperial surgeon was sewing up his face. The pain was appalling, but he kept still and quiet because he was too ashamed to wince. Iseutz was watching, but his eyes were blurred and he couldn’t see her expression. Probably just as well. His left trouser leg was warm and soaking wet. He ought to be wishing he’d died, but he couldn’t. Too weak to die, too humiliated to live. The surgeon leaned forward – for a moment he thought he was going to kiss him, but instead he bit neatly through the suture and turned away. “He’ll be fine,” he heard the surgeon say. No he won’t. Not ever.

  “You were lucky,” Phrantzes said. “Four inches down and he’d have cut your jugular vein. As it is, you’ll just have to grow a beard.”

  Giraut was peering over Phrantzes’ shoulder. He’d seen people look like that at funerals, paying their respects to the white, cold dead. Behind him, Tzimisces was talking loudly to three men in dark red gowns. He laughed, and one of the men nodded vigorously.

  “Anyway, it’s over and we’re all more or less in one piece,” Phrantzes went on. “Which is a hell of a lot more than I could’ve hoped for not so long ago. Well, you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve got to go and talk to the Permians about this reception. Well done.”

  Well done. Was he trying to be funny?

  Perhaps the worst thing about the world at that moment was that it was so horribly full of people. No sooner had Phrantzes gone away than Iseutz and Giraut came and hovered over him. “Are you all right?” Iseutz asked. Giraut stood a pace behind her – long measure – wearing an embarrassed-in-the-presence-of-suffering look.

  He nodded. He had a good excuse for not talking, though it was in fact a lie. The wound was only just starting to stiffen up.

  “You did pretty well not to get killed,” Iseutz said.

  He managed to shut her up with a grunt, followed by an exaggerated wince. “Sorry,” she said, “you can’t talk, I understand. I’m going to speak to the creep about this. That wasn’t fencing, it was …” She opened her mouth, but maybe the word she’d chosen was too big to get out from between her teeth. “I’ll talk to him,” sh
e said. “I’ll make sure he listens.”

  She patted him lightly on the shoulder, and his flesh crawled. She turned away quickly. Giraut nodded gravely and bolted after her. Addo screwed his eyes shut, but that pulled on the cut on his forehead, which was just starting to scab over. He could feel his heartbeat through both wounds, as though being damaged was his only evidence that he was still alive.

  “We can be pleased with ourselves,” Tzimisces said. “It all went off extremely well.”

  He looked perfectly at home: a wine glass in his hand, a freshly pressed shirt under his gown, the reception politely raucous behind him. He was smiling. He reminded Phrantzes of a lizard.

  “In fact,” he went on, “it’s hard to see how it could’ve gone better, in the circumstances. We won three out of four events, they won the only match they care about, nobody got killed, so we’re all still friends. No harm done, and I think we can say we’ve made a pretty solid start.”

  Phrantzes could think of nothing to say. Fortunately, he wasn’t called on for a contribution.

  “I had a word with the representatives of their Board of Control,” Tzimisces went on, “and off the record, they don’t mind in the least if we wipe the floor with them in rapier and longsword. Quite the reverse. Apparently they’re quite concerned about the recent trend towards what they regard as effete Western disciplines. If we can put their fencers off fighting rapier, so much the better; they’ll stick to messers, which is the traditional form, and that’ll please the Board. Longsword’s always been a minority form here, and we didn’t completely humiliate them, so they’re not bothered about that. As for the girls, they’re ambivalent about women in the sport, to say the least. There’s a long tradition of it, granted, but …”

  Phrantzes nodded and made an I’m-listening noise. He’d looked all round the room, but he couldn’t see Suidas anywhere. He became aware that the lizard had stopped talking, and tried to remember where the conversation had got to.

  “I don’t see young Deutzel anywhere,” Tzimisces said. “He really ought to be making the rounds. After all, he’s our national champion.”

  Phrantzes got away with a nod.

  “What was all that about, by the way?” Tzimisces went on. “Deutzel was supposed to be fencing messer, wasn’t he? Only I made rather a thing of it: our champion, their national form. Perhaps next time you change the game plan, you might have a word with me first.”

  “It was a last-minute thing,” Phrantzes managed to say.

  “Fair enough.” Tzimisces was looking thoughtfully at him, as if trying to decide if he was safe to eat. “And we’ve got to hold something in reserve for the big match in the capital, so it’s worked out quite well. Maybe we should have Bryennius fence messer at the next place.”

  “I don’t—” Phrantzes cut himself short and took a breath. “I don’t think he’s up to it,” he said. “It wouldn’t be safe.”

  That, apparently, was a good enough reason. “Well, we don’t want anything like that,” Tzimisces said. “So, we’ll stick with Carnufex for Beaute, and save Deutzel for the grand finale. Yes, I’m quite happy with that.” He gave Phrantzes what was presumably meant to be a warm smile. “Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve handled it all very well indeed.”

  I haven’t done anything, Phrantzes wanted to yell. Just as well he didn’t; it’d have sounded like he was a prisoner being dragged away. “Thank you,” he muttered.

  “But you’d better just cut along and find Deutzel,” Tzimisces added. “I know he’s been dry for quite a while now, but this would be a very bad time for him to have a relapse.”

  Phrantzes hadn’t thought of that. “I’ll find him,” he said, and fled.

  Addo chose a Permian at random, cleared his throat, smiled and said, “Excuse me, but where’s the …?”

  The Permian looked at him; not unfriendly, but puzzled. “Excuse me?”

  “The … um.”

  “The what, sorry?”

  “I wish to urinate. Where should I go?”

  The Permian frowned and pointed to a door. “Thank you,” Addo said, and headed for it.

  Outside, the air smelt of rain. Addo looked round. It was too dark to see beyond the dim leakage of light showing through the half-open door. He unbuckled his belt and lowered his trousers.

  “Addo? Is that you?”

  He froze. He hadn’t seen Suidas, crouched on the ground in the shadows. He mumbled an apology and hauled his trousers up, as Suidas slowly dragged himself to his feet.

  “How are you feeling?” Suidas said.

  “Oh, could be worse.”

  Suidas shook his head. His face was in shadow. “There’ll be a scar,” he said.

  “Not to worry. It’s not like I was ever a thing of beauty.”

  Suidas moved away a little. “The important thing,” he said, “is finding a way of dealing with it. In my case, I killed every Permian I could find. Then, after the war, I drank myself stupid. I wouldn’t recommend either of those. On balance, they caused more problems than they solved. I’m sorry,” he added.

  “What for?”

  “Fine.” Suidas shook his head. “It doesn’t alter what happened, though. But I really am sorry.” Suddenly he laughed. “Ludicrous, isn’t it? Here we are again, in Permia, only this time the orders are don’t kill Permians. A man could get seriously confused.”

  Addo looked at him carefully. “My father says you were a war hero.”

  “Does he? Then it must be true, mustn’t it?”

  “When I agreed to come here, I asked him who I’d be going with. He made some enquiries. He let me read the dispatches, about the time when you—”

  “You don’t want to go believing everything you read,” Suidas said. “And don’t ever talk about that stuff again. Please,” he added. “All right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Wonderful. And now I’ll leave you to pee in peace. You must be bursting.”

  The lodgings provided for them had once been a temple, built before the Empire came, before it split into East and West. The names of its gods were still discernible, engraved on pedestals of missing statues, written under painted figures faded into blank silhouettes; but the language and alphabet had been mislaid at some point, and nobody knew what they meant. Each of the party was given a chapel to sleep in: a plain, narrow bed in the centre of a huge square room with an impossibly high vaulted ceiling; no other furniture. No fireplace, either. Instead, they were each provided with a small iron charcoal brazier, military issue.

  “Don’t use the bloody things, whatever you do,” Suidas warned them. “No chimney. You’ll be dead by morning from the fumes.”

  Iseutz stared up into the belly of the dome above her head, shivered and decided she’d risk it; better to suffocate painlessly in her sleep than freeze to death. Eventually she got the thing lit, using the last of the tinder she’d brought from home. The brazier gave out a faint orange glow, not nearly enough to read by, and no perceptible heat. She pulled the sheets and the one thin blanket off the bed, wrapped them around her like bandages, and looked round for a corner to huddle in. It was, of course, a circular room.

  Giraut’s room was on two levels. There was a raised section, like a stage, where a high altar had once stood. The floor was veined green marble. He lay down on top of the bed and immediately fell asleep.

  Addo’s chapel was being used as overflow storage for the Fencers’ Guild library. There were books stacked everywhere on the floor; you could’ve built a fortress out of them and held off an army. There was also a lamp. He lit it, picked up a book at random and lay down on the bed, propped up against the head-board so his face wouldn’t touch the pillows. The book was an early edition of The Fencer’s Mirror, a text he was well acquainted with. But this version was about a hundred years earlier than his father’s copy, with strange, stick-like figures instead of the magnificently muscled, superbly bearded demigods he’d grown up with, and the guards and moves they illustrated were ever so slightly
different. He leafed slowly through until he came to a picture of two men facing each other with long, curved knives. Here they fight with messers. God help them. He retrieved the bread and cheese he’d liberated from the reception and settled down to read.

  In spite of the cold, Suidas eventually fell asleep, and dreamt, as he did occasionally, of the destruction of Flos Verjan. In his dream, he was standing on a bridge, looking down into the turbulent waters of a river. Suddenly the river rose, as if waking up, and lifted the bridge, with him still on it, and swept it away. He turned his head and saw the city; the river was taking him there, he was riding on its back like a cavalryman. He was so high, he was looking down on the city, as though he was approaching the edge of a waterfall. Through a curtain of fine spray he could see streets, buildings, crowds of people staring up at him. I can’t help that, he thought, and the wave started to fall, the streets and the people grew larger. It was all right, though; all he had to do was cross the bridge and he’d be safe. He took a step, but there was someone in the way, a Permian with a messer in his left hand. He turned, but the same man was blocking the other side – which shouldn’t be happening, because the general had sent men to secure this bridge, no matter what the cost. He reached for his own messer but it wasn’t there.

  Phrantzes couldn’t get to sleep, so he lay awake and worried about his wife, stuck in a convent with sixty elderly, hostile nuns. It’d be cold there (Sphagia despised the cold) and there’d be bells every hour to call the nuns to prayer, and she snarled like a tiger if anything disturbed her sleep, and they ate bare bread and salted porridge, so the poor girl must be starving. After three or four hours of that, he got up and lit the lamp, sat on the edge of the bed and tried to think what to do about Addo.