The Crimson Sky

by Joel Rosenberg

  Or, for that matter, why an ordinary of the House of Flame would be happy to see someone who had snatched the Brisingamen ruby almost literally from under his nose, and conveyed it to Freya for safekeeping.

  “Then why did you say you were happy to see me?”

  “I didn’t say I was happy; I said I was pleased,” Branden del Branden said, as though daring Ian to take offense. “Vereden del Harold, whose troop waits for you at the northern pass, owes me a ram, and his troop owes my troop a feasting.” He gestured at the men behind him, who sat eyeing Ian and Hosea with what Ian hoped was professional interest rather than the cold hostility that it felt like.

  Gratitude apparently wasn’t high on the list of attributes among the ruling class of the Dominions. Well, that didn’t make them different from rulers in other times, other places, did it?

  Shit.

  “How did you know I was coming?” Ian asked.

  Branden del Branden barely glanced skyward before his eyes fastened back on Ian’s. “I couldn’t say,” he said.

  Oh, Ian thought. I think maybe I’d like to teach you how to play high-stakes poker, Branden del Branden. You’ve got a wicked tell.

  “A little bird told you—told him, eh?” he said in English.

  “I would imagine a large one,” Hosea answered, also in English, from behind him.

  That was the trouble with messing around with the gods. Once they took an interest in you, they kept an interest in you. Would it have been Freya or Odin who had sent Hugin or Munin to the Dominions, sending word that Ian was back in Tir Na Nog? And why?

  If it was for his own good, somebody would have already told him about that. So it wasn’t.

  “So you’re here to meet me?” Ian nodded. “For what purpose?”

  Branden del Branden shrugged. “To give you food and horses, and convey you safely to the Dominions and to the House of the Sky.” His expression grew inutterably bland. “There’s been word that there are Sons seeking the blood of your friends, and perhaps they might settle for yours.” He turned to Hosea. “If you’ll see to getting the attention of that vestri servant of yours who seems to be emulating a gopher, perhaps we can serve you a quick repast, and then be on our way.” He chuckled quietly to himself. “I never thought I’d be ordered to convey the Promised Warrior safely into the Dominions at all, and much less into the presence of the klaffvarer to the Scion himself.”

  Not this again. Damn. “I’m not sure there will ever be a Promised Warrior, but even if there is, it’s not me. I’m not the Promised Warrior,” Ian said, tiredly. “I’m just Ian Silverstein, from—from Hardwood, North Dakota, USA, and while I’m not the worst man with a sword that there’s ever been, there’s nothing legendary or magical about my abilities, and I not only couldn’t lead the armies of Vandescard to conquer the Dominions, I wouldn’t. Truly.” He spread his hands. “I’m not somebody you have to worry about.”

  Harbard’s ring felt heavy on his finger. It would be easy to use it to persuade Branden del Branden of that—but would it be wise? What would the others of the Dominions think if Branden del Branden was persuaded of something they all doubted? Particularly since he probably didn’t have a reputation for being easily convinced.

  And if he couldn’t rely on the gratitude of the men of the Cities, perhaps a bit of fear would help.

  Or perhaps not.

  The road up to the Cities was long and twisting. If you were an ordinary of the House of Flame, and you thought you might be accompanying the man who had somehow been destined to conquer your otherwise unconquerable home, you might well want to see how many times he could bounce down the side of a mountain.

  “There is nothing to worry about, you say?” Branden del Branden nodded briskly, his smile broadening. “Ah. I thank you for that reassurance.” He took a step back and drew himself up straight. “I choose to take offense at your insult, and accept your insult as a challenge.”

  “Eh?”

  “You’ve accused me of worry, of fear. That’s not the worst insult a man has ever faced, but I’ve certainly fought over less. It is a matter of honor, after all.” He swallowed, once, heavily. “Will my first blood be sufficient to satisfy your honor, as yours shall satisfy mine?”

  He’s scared of me. So why is he picking a fight?

  It didn’t matter, not now. No, of course it mattered. Knowledge of your opponent’s motivations could be as useful as a counter-riposte, on or off the fencing strip.

  Hosea took a step forward. “Of course first blood shall satisfy Ian, Branden del Branden, if it comes to that,”‘ he said, gently. “But I say to you, as his second, that no insult was intended.”

  Branden del Branden nodded sagely. “I accept that, of course.”

  The thickset man that held Branden del Branden’s shield tossed the shield to another, then dropped heavily to the ground. His boots thudded hard as he stalked toward where Ian and Hosea stood facing Branden del Branden.

  “As Branden del Branden’s second,” he said, “I reject your assurance. Offense has been given; challenge has been given; acceptance has been given.”

  If Branden del Branden had any objection to his second’s intervention, it didn’t show in his face, or in his silence.

  It was starting to fall into place. The men from the Cities had tried something like this with Torrie, once. Their intent had been, at least in theory, simply to see how good he was.

  It had gone horribly wrong. The idiot who had challenged Torrie had tried for the sort of wound that runs from the front of the chest to the back of it. Torrie had killed the idiot in self-defense, and while Branden del Branden had eventually agreed to accept that the death hadn’t been deliberate, he had not agreed to believe it.

  So, rather than have another of his men challenge Ian, he had done it himself. A quick testing duel to see how good Ian was with his sword was apparently the idea, and he had to admire Branden del Branden’s courage, if not his good sense.

  Shit, if all you wanted was to fence with me, that could have been arranged without all this. Try asking next time.

  “When?” he asked.

  Branden del Branden turned to his second. “Shall we eat first?”

  “I think not.” The heavyset man shook his head. “Not until honor has been settled,” he said.

  Branden del Branden raised his hands. “What can I say? Iwald del Dergen thinks we should proceed now.”

  “Very well.” Ian nodded. “As you wish. I’ll want a few moments to prepare, if that’s not a problem. And if it is, I’ll still want a few moments to prepare.”

  Branden del Branden made an openhanded gesture. “Of course,” he said, smiling. “Take all the time you need, Ian Silver Stone.”

  Ian’s mind raced as he sat on the dirt of the road, removing his heavy hiking boots while Hosea dug a pair of sneakers from his pack. The kind of boots that protected your feet when you were tramping up and down the sides of mountains didn’t make for a light touch or quick movements in a duel. Yes, he would fight in them if he had to—shit, he’d fight buck naked, or wearing a grass skirt, if he had to; that’s what had to meant—but Ian always believed in taking every advantage he could get.

  And he had been walking all day; it wasn’t like he was coming to this cold, so he didn’t need to do his stretches.

  Like hell he didn’t.

  You didn’t use the same muscles and tendons in a hike, and even more than your equipment—and he had no worries about Giantkiller letting him down—you had to be able to count on your body to do what you told it to.

  Yes, the wrist was the center around which a match or a duel orbited, but the legs were the force that drove the orbit, that powered the match. One stretched tendon, one charley horse, one momentary muscle spasm could anchor you in place on a fencing strip or in a dueling circle, and end it all—because in any universe, if your opponent could control either space or time, he controlled everything.

  Hosea had his right sock off, and the way he was massaging Ian�
��s smelly, sweaty foot dry felt obscenely good. “I know little about Branden del Branden’s style,” Hosea said. “Only what Thorian and Ivar del Hival have discussed, and that was largely the observations of Ivar del Hival, who is by no means the best duelist I’ve ever seen.”

  Ian had fenced with Ivar del Hival and could beat the older man easily. On the other hand, in hand-to-hand grappling, Ivar del Hival knew how to use his bulk and strength to good advantage, and while his wrist and arm were strong but slow, his eye was reasonably keen, although not in the same league as Thorian Thorsen’s.

  “And …?” Ian launched himself into the first of his stretches, like he had done more times than he thought he could count. He stood flatfooted, and bent over far enough to grasp his calves, and then bent forward slowly, inexorably.

  The tendons in his hamstrings and his butt felt like hot piano wires. So he stretched them more, not ignoring the pain, but insisting on it. The more it hurt, the better. Pain in his hamstrings wouldn’t kill him, or even harm him; he couldn’t stretch hard enough to hurt himself, not as long as he did it slowly and deliberately.

  “He’s strong,” Hosea said, “and perhaps overly fond of the pris-de-fer, or perhaps insufficiently fond of fencing in the absence. He tends to fight Ingarian-style—”

  Ian straightened, and worked his shoulders. “Fancy. Like he’s fighting with a foil. Close in; high speed; up-and-down until you think you’ve caught the pattern, and then wham.”

  “Exactly.”

  Well, that could easily work to Ian’s advantage, he thought, as his body brought him through the rest of his stretches, letting his mind float freely.

  Ian had been exclusively a foil fencer, until recently. It had been a logical necessity; he had stayed with the foil for the same reasons that a plumber would stay with a plunger—not out of affection for it, but because it was a tool that put money in his pocket, and because the money in his pocket put food in his mouth.

  The way you got beginning students to tutor was by winning matches—ideally, every fucking point in every damn match you entered. Almost all beginning students started with foil, some moving on to the so-called advanced weapons—epée and saber—as though there wasn’t enough to learn about supposedly simple foil fencing to fill a hundred dozen lifetimes.

  And if Ian was going to get through school—and he was—he couldn’t do it working at McDonald’s. The time that you could pull yourself up and through to the other side of college at anything near minimum wage was long gone, if it ever had existed, something Ian was skeptical of in the first place.

  Other kids had parents to put them through. Or families. Or scholarships.

  Ian had himself, and that was all. Until recently.

  And that sucked.

  He shook his head to clear it. Yes, it sucked. Yes, it was horribly unfair that he’d had an asshole of a drunk of a childbeater of a father who had kicked Ian out when Ian had decided he wasn’t going to be a punching bag for his asshole of a drunk of a childbeater of a father, not any more.

  All that was true.

  But he had better leave the angst for another time. If he didn’t concentrate on the duel instead of on what a shitty hand life had dealt him in the person of that shitty excuse for a father, Benjamin Silverstein, what he might get was a sword through his gizzard.

  Wherever his gizzard was, he didn’t need a sword stuck through it.

  He let his head roll around on his neck, ignoring the occasional jeer and titter that came from the line of now-dismounted horsemen.

  Go ahead, assholes. Laugh.

  Branden del Branden had stripped himself down to what passed for informal dueling clothes in the Cities: light slippers over bare feet, tight white trousers covered by a loose white tunic that looked like a karate gi except for the lace embroidery at the hem, belted tightly at the waist.

  White for purity? White because it was hard to clean, and the nobility of the Cities could never do things the easy way when the hard way would do? Or white because it would show blood, and a Cities duelist might well choose to claim that a touch never happened if he could get away with it?

  Maybe it was for all those reasons. It undoubtedly wasn’t poverty that had caused Branden del Branden to have several small rips inexpertly stitched across the right arm, with a larger one on the right thigh and left knee. Those were advertisements, presumably, of points lost, a matter of pride, perhaps, like a Heidelberg scar—except you couldn’t take a Heidelberg scar off and throw it to a vestri servant to wash it for you at the end of the day.

  And a Heidelberg scar, perhaps, wasn’t a road map to how you lost points. Branden del Branden’s fencing outfit said that he took most of his hits on his swordarm. Perhaps he was too eager to close, too eager to lunge, too eager to extend.

  Too eager to win? It was entirely possible to be too eager to win.

  But you could never tell with the men of the Cities. For them, honor and deviousness were woven together in a complex pattern—it was entirely possible that some of the rips were artificial, intended to mislead; and it was equally possible that to do that was as dishonorable as a Heidelberg fencer getting his schmiss by plastic surgery.

  But it didn’t matter.

  Ian could take him. He felt it in his muscles, and he knew it in his bones with a certainty that frightened him: Branden del Branden could not beat him. Not here, not today, and probably not anywhere, not ever.

  Ian smiled as he slipped out of his thick flannel shirt, and put on the Villanova T-shirt he had won in his first college fencing match—Ian had a lot of T-shirts from other schools. He had thought for a moment about skipping the shirt—no need to get it sweaty if he didn’t have to, or bloody, for that matter, if it came to that—but wondered if the play of his muscles under his skin could give Branden del Branden a clue as to what his next move might be.

  At the poker table or on the fencing strip, you never wanted to give away any information accidentally. You couldn’t always win, but when you couldn’t, you made the fuckers earn every pot. Every point. Every time.

  You gave nothing away, not to the person on the other side of the poker table, and not to the person on the other end of the fencing strip, not because you hated them—Ian saved his hate for those who had earned it—but because any pot you could win, any point you could take, was yours, and little enough in this world was yours. Branden del Branden took up his sword and gave it a few tentative swings through the air.

  It was, through no coincidence, similar in shape and size to Giantkiller: technically a saber—it was sharp enough on both edges well back from its needle point—but in practice used more like an epée. Branden del Branden’s sword had the simple quillons that were common hereabouts; Giantkiller now sported a shiny half-bell guard that Hosea had fitted to it, to suit Ian’s preference for more protection of the hand.

  He took Giantkiller in his hand—and it felt almost embarrassingly good, as always, to wrap his fingers around his sword’s grip—and raised the sword in a simple salute.

  By Middle Dominion standards, that was an arrogant thing to do. Here, as at home, you could tell who somebody’s teacher was by the salute, and here, unlike at home, to use a simple salute was to declare that you were sui generis, but that was fine with Ian. Branden del Branden’s salute was a complex cloverleaf that Thorian Thorsen would probably have been able to read like a book—but he wasn’t here, and Branden del Branden’s point was.

  Ian advanced tentatively, but Branden del Branden closed the distance with a bound.

  Within moments of their first crossing swords, Ian knew how to take him. Branden del Branden was a show-off, and he could never use a simple attack when a complicated one would do.

  Ian repressed a smile. It was like fencing with his younger self: Branden del Branden fought like a foil fencer out to show off every trick, every change of engagement that he had been taught. Parry and riposte, then counter-riposte, taking the blade from high to low or from low to high.

  This w
as too easy. You beat complexity with simplicity at epée, or in a duel, or in life.

  Dismiss the multiple compound attacks, the second intention, the attempt to force you to close and play his game. Don’t let him take your blade, but draw an attack, and control the distance on retreat. Don’t fence foil, don’t try to match his complexity with yours, but wait for the opportunity to end it simply.

  Patience was a virtue. A duel was a contest not of strengths but of weaknesses. You didn’t have to win by being better than your opponent; you won most of the time by exploiting his mistakes, while not making one he could exploit.

  So keep it simple, and remember that to touch, to cut, to win required extending the arm, but that extending the arm brought your arm into his reach for the touch, for the cut.

  Ian’s had greater reach; Branden del Branden’s had strength and perhaps a touch of speed.

  But none of it mattered. He could—

  No. Ian exposed his wrist to draw a stop-hit, then disengaged and extended—

  —and Branden del Branden dropped into a low-line lunge, bringing Ian’s blade harmlessly over his shoulder, while his point slid past Ian’s defenses to scratch a line of pain across Ian’s thigh.

  Ian beat Branden del Branden’s blade aside as he retreated, hobbling. There was a moment where Branden del Branden would have been able to redouble his attack, and might have been able to make a second touch—

  But no; that wasn’t what he was trying to do, and Ian didn’t even have to beat the blade away.

  Branden del Branden’s eyes were wide with surprise as he looked at the blood on his blade and at the dark stain spreading across the outside of Ian’s jeans, but he brought himself to attention, and held the pose until Ian managed to straighten and salute him.

  His eyes narrowed for a moment. He was wondering if it had been too easy.

  “Perhaps I’ll do better next time, Branden del Branden,” Ian said. “But nicely done,” he said, Harbard’s ring pulsing hard on his finger, “and well scored.”