No Present Like Time

by Steph Swainston

  Serein flung both hands up and bounded back. He landed in high guard, with both blades pointing at Wrenn’s face. Wrenn ducked below them to attack-he flattened himself to the floor, one leg out behind, lunged forward with the rapier at arm’s length.

  Serein got low to thrust, but Wrenn was quick to his feet. Serein stood still, parried with dagger, thrust with sword. Wrenn pulled his cut to keep out of distance. He thrust under Serein’s arm.

  “That’s three from the left,” muttered Lightning. “He’ll change now.”

  That’s what Wrenn wanted us to think. He attacked from the left. He traversed to the opposite leg and changed dagger grip, so the blade was down. He leaned in, back straight, made a wide sweep, but too close and almost ran onto Serein’s rapier. The crowd inhaled, expecting a double kill, but Wrenn, off balance, gave ground and the two began to circle again.

  Wrenn launched a heavy cut to Serein’s shoulder.

  If this was me, I would-

  Serein jumped and stopped it with just his dagger before it gained momentum.

  Well, I wouldn’t do that.

  Then he tried to kick Wrenn in the balls.

  Wrenn leapt away, threw his weight back and returned a reverse thrust at the same time.

  I gasped. I’d never seen a fencer move that accurately before.

  Serein couldn’t turn inside the thrust, and retreated, face sallow. He allowed his rapier point to drop from guard for the first time. It gave Wrenn time to rally; he tried a cleaving blow. Serein beat it aside, turned his sword and cut at Wrenn’s exposed hand. Wrenn backed off just fast enough to keep his hand. He parried, the dagger coming up beneath his rapier for support. He lifted Serein’s blade, but Serein snatched it free. Wrenn faced Serein squarely, his whole body curved into a hollow, his middle held away and his left foot down securely.

  They found new strength, remembering that they’re fighting for immortality. San forbids his immortals to kill their Challengers, although genuine accidents happen now and again. Serein looked furious at how long this was taking, he was channeling all his brilliance at getting first blood from the young man.

  Of course, no money Serein’s novices could offer him would lead him to reveal his finest moves. He never taught his students enough for them to Challenge him. But it seemed that Wrenn had reinvented all Serein’s techniques from scratch, and added his own innovations.

  Serein deliberately made an out-of-distance attack, trying to draw Wrenn in. Wrenn was having none of it, he kept his body well away. Serein tried a better angle, this time Wrenn’s dagger parried low. Serein’s rapier drove straight at it. The blades shunted together. Serein punched his swept hilt at Wrenn’s fist. The dagger shot from Wrenn’s stunned hand like a dart.

  Wrenn did not look for it but changed his rapier to his right hand, wringing his fingers. He was at a serious disadvantage. Serein’s eyes tracked Wrenn’s expression as he deigned a smile.

  “It’s only a matter of time…” Lightning said.

  Wrenn knocked Serein’s rapier up with his sword’s forte, sliced across Serein’s stomach. Serein kept his arms out of the way. His confidence peaked; he didn’t need to give ground. He could just wait.

  “Serein will stick him like a pig.”

  Wrenn made a straight thrust in quarte, Serein turned it easily. Everyone watched Serein beating Wrenn back across the releager, step by step until they were right underneath the Emperor’s box. Wrenn was beginning to look from Serein’s rapier to dagger, and I could see his mouth was open.

  Serein was lining up a way to end this. He feinted with the dagger, swung his rapier around in an outside moulinet for force, straight down at Wrenn’s head.

  And Wrenn stepped into the blow.

  He caught the inside of Serein’s hand on the grip with his own wrist, forced it aside. His rapier arrested Serein’s dagger and he stretched that arm fully to the other side. He tilted his blade; the tip lowered to Serein’s throat. Serein struggled, stopped. Face-to-face they were so close their chests nearly touched. Wrenn looked Serein straight in the eyes, made an almost imperceptible movement of the point and a red trickle ran down below the Swordsman’s larynx, between his collar bones into the front of his shirt. First blood.

  Wrenn punched both arms into the air. “Yes!” he yelled. “I did it! I really fucking did it!”

  For a second there was silence, and I could tell the same thought was running through every mind in the throng: how brave have you got to be to step into a cut in prime? Wrenn was prepared to die if his trick failed. Knowing he has to die sometime, he risked it for the ultimate reward. Serein had lost that mortal determination-well, all us Eszai are living on borrowed time.

  The crowd erupted. A lady next to me put her hands over her ears, the cheering was so loud.

  “What timing,” Lightning breathed. “What bloody timing.” He vaulted the low wall and sprinted across the pitch. I got to the duelists first, saw Lightning throw a brotherly arm around Wrenn’s shoulders. Wrenn lowered his rapier, swayed on his feet. He was about to faint.

  I was suddenly at the focal point, and almost deafened by the crowds. Outside the lit ground the stands were invisible but the applause was like a wall of sound. A chant caught like city-fire and spread through the stands: “Wrenn for Serein! Wrenn for Serein!” Fyrd swordsmen stamped their feet on the wooden benches; the thunder went on and on. Soldiers in civvies began to spill out onto the pitch. I clapped my hands until the palms stung.

  “Yes!” yelled Tornado, with one fist in the air. He stuck two fingers in his mouth and gave a long whistle.

  “Well done!” Lightning exclaimed. “Well done, my friend!” He turned Wrenn to the yelling crowd and raised Wrenn’s shaking arm. “The victor!”

  Serein, beaten, opened his hands and let his dagger and rapier fall to the trodden sand. They smelled weakly of disinfectant. He looked around for a place to lie, knelt down, then curled up from humiliation and sheer exhaustion with his hands over his head.

  Wrenn seemed frightened. He looked more terrified the more he realized how many people were out there. His face had a luster from the grease smeared on his forehead to stop sweat running into his eyes. He was beyond the limits of mental and physical endurance; he stumbled. Lightning walked him toward the Doctor’s bench, but the crowd swallowed them in and then hoisted up Wrenn in the center, hands on his legs and backside like a crowd-surfer. They carried him high above their heads, into the square passageway and rapidly out of the fencing ground. The floodlights highlighted tousled wings and assorted backs as they ebbed away from us. Serein and I were left alone.

  The sea of fog breached the far wall and poured down, slipping toward us at ground level.

  “That’s it,” the Swordsman murmured. “Is that it? Am I out?”

  He gradually got to his feet, shoulders bowed, head lowered.

  “Serein,” I said. “It comes to us all in the end.”

  He looked at me resentfully, but I couldn’t tell whether he was sighing from overexertion or bitterness. “Once I’ve left the Circle I won’t want to see you again,” he admitted. “Don’t visit me, Jant-I don’t want you to see me grow old.” He put a hand to his throat, rubbed it, and gazed at his red palm. The blood flow had practically stopped, but he was sticky with it chin to waist.

  He looked up to the hulking empty stands. “It’s the fear that takes it out of you.” He rested his hand on my shoulder for a second. Then he picked up his rapier, broke it over his knee, and walked off the field.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I climbed the spiral staircase to my tower room. The murals on its walls became more lurid and grotesque toward the top. I don’t remember painting them; I must have been really stoned.

  “Hello, lover,” I said, emerging from the doorway.

  Tern was waiting in the lower part of the round split-level room, her hands on her hips. Anger spiced her voice. “Look at you! All windswept! God, you look like a juggler from the Hacilith festival! Out of those flea-bitten mo
untain clothes and into a suit…Here, wear this one; it’s elegant.” She gave me a light and unusually demure kiss on the cheek. I looked around our untidy apartment that my wife had colonized with architectural drawings, cosmetics, rolls of fabric and an enormous wardrobe inside which I am sure a Rhydanne couple could live quite happily.

  My carefully stacked letters slid into each other under Tern’s discarded dresses. All my specific piles of correspondence had formed one mass like the Paperlands and reeked of her expensive perfume. She saw my look of horror and said, “I tidied up your mess.”

  “That was my filing system! The letters I’ve read go on the table, noteworthy letters on the floor under the desk. The ones I haven’t read are on the fireplace next to the pine cones…Where have they gone?”

  My alphabetized books were spattered with used matches and sealing wax. Shed feathers littered my collection of old broadsheets. Tern’s gowns covered the chaise longue where I like to lounge; dress patterns were taped on the posts of our bed. Her underclothes were scattered in mounds. She had even disturbed the dusty table on which stood my precious distilling apparatus, although I had reassembled the glass retorts and condenser solely for the production of barley sugars.

  Tern wore a bustier of chartreuse-green satin; its pleated sleeves wreathed her small black wings. At her throat, her wide jet heirloom necklace looked like a collar. “This is all the rage,” she purred. “Well, I say it is.”

  “How do I unfasten it?” Her bare shoulders made her all the more tempting. I tried to undo her hair but her usual loose dark waves were pulled back into a complicated chignon.

  My wife’s town was reduced to brick shards and ashy rubble by the Great Fire of 2015. Of her black stone manor house only one single outside wall still stood. Slug-trail slicks of molten glass hardened from its pointed arched windows; lead roofs lay in solidified pools. The stumps of scrubby trees in her woodland were burned flat to the ground. Every building and foundry in Wrought was destroyed, none of her possessions escaped the flames. Wrought was her birthplace and the scene of our honeymoon; Tern now aspired to rebuild it completely. Luckily, her designer fashions sold well on the Hacilith cat-walks and as far as she was concerned Wrenn joining the Circle was an opportunity for trendsetting. She caressed my wings as I peeled off my tight trousers and changed clothes. Long wings are considered the most attractive, and as feathers need a lot of preening, Awians look after their high-maintenance bodies with care.

  “I didn’t see the duel,” Tern said. “I needed the time to get ready. I heard from Rayne that the Challenger gave Serein a good nick to remember him by.”

  “It was a first-blood duel,” I said. “Those were the rules, so Wrenn had to.”

  “I hear that Wrenn is scrumptious,” she commented. I shrugged. I seated myself in front of the mirror and let her brush my black hair that reaches to my waist, removing all the tangles caused by flying. It was agony. When she finished I crossed feathers through it like windmill sails and underlined my eyes.

  “Listen.” Tern raised a finger at the clatter of coaches vying for space in the courtyard far below. “I hear some ladies inviting themselves to his reception. Those can’t be reporters or they would never have managed to sneak past Tawny at the gate.”

  “We have an hour. I’ve been on my own in Scree for weeks. I want you.”

  Tern pulled away-so as not to ruin the painstaking work of art she has made of herself. I gave her the full benefit of my cat-eyed look that she found so exotic. “We should clear a space to sit down…Perhaps lie down.”

  “Come and join the clamor,” she said.

  Tern, you and your diamond self-sufficiency.

  Unlike the stately homes of Awia, the Castle’s sarsen outer bastions were thick, sturdy and unassailable. The Castle’s purpose was defense of the entire Fourlands; it protected every manor, growing gatehouses and curtain walls while they bloomed balconies and arched dance halls, ornate turrets and painted bartizans.

  The ground around the Castle was thrown into immense earth-works to ward off Insects. A channel of the Moren River was directed into a double moat around its man-made hill. The twin exterior walls that ran around the Castle’s eight sides were strengthened by huge cylindrical smooth stone-faced towers decorated with crenellations and with shallow pointed roofs. Along the walls flags rustled and furled; the heraldry of the Fourlands’ current sixteen manors and two townships. Fifty pennants flew under the Castle’s sun, each with the sign that an Eszai had chosen for his or her position.

  The Emperor’s palace fitted inside the Castle like the flesh in a nutshell. Its marble towers stretched up from inside the impenetrable curtain wall. The Throne Room spire was the tallest; farmers who worked the demesne saw the sun glint on its pinnacle and they knew the Emperor occupied his throne beneath.

  As Tern and I walked from our austere tower we saw only glimpses through the cold fog; its attendant hush muted every sound, drawing all the luster from the palace. We saw lights shining behind sash windows and the oculus ovals made to look like portholes of the Mare’s Run wing where Mist had her rooms. A stone-balustraded balcony ran along the length of its top floor, like the gallery on a ship. The Mare’s Run was built between the outer walls and the palace five hundred years ago; it filled some of the space where gardens used to be. Several other buildings were shaped to fit into the western side of the gap: the dining hall and a theater with its scalloped bronze dome topped by a white wood lantern-turret.

  I did not take the rooms owing to me as Messenger in the palace’s Carillon Court when I joined the Circle. I preferred to move into the unused apartment at the top of the Northwest Tower on the outer wall because I found it easy to launch myself from its height. My window gave a view for a hundred kilometers of the river, the playing fields and white goalposts; red dock stalks sticking up from the green rough ground of Binnard meadow. Tern has never persuaded me to move back into the palace.

  Tern shivered and I reached out with a wing to give her a pat on the shoulder. Tern’s wings are much smaller than mine, as are those of all Awians, because although they are the only winged people, they are flightless. I am the sole person ever to be able to fly. As I am half Rhydanne my light, long-limbed build and mountainlander’s fitness, when added to Awian ancestry on my father’s side, gave me my ability.

  Hand in hand Tern and I walked down an enclosed passage over a flying buttress that spanned from the outside wall to the palace. It was a narrow, vertiginous bridge that soared over the roof of the Great Hall, stretching thin and tenuous in the air. Below us, we could only see the glow of lamps in niches outside the hall and on four stone steps that rose to double doors with opulent paneling. The deeply carved decoration inside its triangular pediment was even more ornate: two flamboyant white Awian eagles flanked the Castle’s sun emblem.

  Our buttress walkway crossed above the head of the marble statue that topped the pediment, a slender woman bearing a sword and shield, her luxuriously feathered wings outstretched. Sometimes I land on the roof, providing a sudden perspective-she is twice my size. The hall was built by architects from Micawater, and Lightning is the only Eszai who would remember what the statue actually symbolizes. It could be anything: freedom, justice, the wet dreams of a hundred generations of Awian adolescents.

  As I walked with Tern I thought the whole building seemed smug, as if it had soaked up the atmosphere of too many whispered indiscretions at formal parties and was simply waiting for the next.

  We descended to a small cloister. A colonnaded corridor ran around the misty lawn; we walked along two sides. Outside the Throne Room its stone ceiling was elaborately carved with fan vaulting; bosses hung down like leafy stalactites. Instead of curtains the drapes that framed the Throne Room portal were sculpted from amber.

  The Throne Room seemed even more massive after the narrow narthex. Tern and I walked in down the long aisle past the screen and bowed to the Emperor. The Emperor San was first to be present, according to his custom. This w
as an important occasion, so he wore the tall spired platinum crown that Awia presented to him when the First Circle was formed. San normally wore no crown at all. We settled on one of the front benches, because they were closest to the sunburst throne and I wanted to hear what Wrenn had to say.

  On this side of the screen, the benches faced each other and were gently stepped as in an auditorium. I watched in silence as the other Eszai walked in and gradually filled the seats. Most of the women gazed at Lightning, but some looked at me. I doubt that I cut a fine figure at court, since the fashion’s long gone for looking pale and disheveled, but there’s no denying the effect I have on them. I may not command the battlefield but I can put the best spin on the outcome. I might not be a keen huntsman but I can gut a weekend newspaper. At sparring, I prefer words to swords, and I used to shoot drugs not arrows, but I’m free of all that now.

  Wrenn entered the far end of the Throne Room, tiny below the huge rose window. It was symbolically important that he came in alone. He looked all around nervously and jumped as the doors closed behind him with an enormous crash. Then he began to walk, stiffly and obviously aching all over, toward us down the length of the scarlet carpet that was far more terrifying than any fencing piste. The Imperial Fyrd archers on the gallery with their pulley compound bows watched him carefully.

  “That’s the new Swordsman,” I whispered to Tern. “This ordeal will be worse for him than the duel.” My initiation was an awful trial. “Before this is over, he may well wish he’d died out there.”

  She leaned forward to watch him. “It depends how much he has to hide.”

  Wrenn passed us slowly, giving the curious eyes of all the Eszai time to take him in. His short hair was wet from the bath or the steam room. His clothes were clean, but the same dull blue with thread holes on his sleeve where his fyrd patch used to be. He only looked straight ahead to the Emperor’s dais-though not, of course, to the Emperor himself. He reached the platform’s lowest step and knelt.