by K. J. Parker
“That’s Luzir?” Phrantzes said nervously. “You’re sure?”
“Nowhere else it could be,” Addo said. He sounded exhausted. “More by luck than judgement and two days late, but we made it.”
“You made it.” Iseutz was sitting up, looking at the city. “You got us here, and all I’ve done is whine at you. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Addo said. “You were right and I was wrong. I shouldn’t have lost my nerve.” He shook his head. “Well,” he said, “I suppose we’d better go and let them know we’re here. I hope they’ll be pleased to see us.”
They were. Not at first: three bloodstained, wild-looking men and a snake-haired girl in a rich man’s coach rolling into town covered in dust from the direction of the troubles drew brief, hostile stares from the country people in the perfectly square fields, and they had an awkward moment when they reached the city gate and the Blueskin guards quite obviously didn’t believe them; fortunately, they sent for the duty officer, who’d been issued with a description of the missing Scherian touring party. It was, of course, wildly inaccurate – they’d got Addo’s height and eye colour wrong, Phrantzes wasn’t mentioned at all and Iseutz was supposed to be a man. But the Permian in charge of gate tolls was a fencing fan, who’d recently been dividing his time between rereading accounts of the match at Joiauz and bewailing the cancellation of the Luzir fixture. He vouched for them personally, swept Giraut up in his arms and kissed him on both cheeks (he was nearest) and took them off to his lodgings on the top floor of the gatehouse. For a while, Giraut was convinced he was going to keep them for his very own; but his sense of civic duty must have prevailed, because he sent a runner to the Guild house to let the Master know the Scherians had arrived. Then he ran a sort of controlled experiment to see how many honey cakes, almond biscuits and cream-cheese-with-chives-in-little-choux-pastry-horns he could stuff down their throats before the official welcoming committee arrived.
They came in a closed coach, the windows blacked out with shutters, and footmen lined up to make a human wall to keep the honoured guests from being seen. “You’ve no idea,” the Master’s assistant told them, as the coach started to roll through the broad streets. “When we got word you’d been trapped in Beaute and weren’t coming, we nearly had a riot on our hands. Eighteen thousand tickets we’ve sold. They had me in up at the Prefecture. They were deciding which roads to close off, if things got nasty.”
It was strange and rather unnerving to see streets filled with people again. Giraut couldn’t resist pulling back a corner of the shutter, but the Master’s assistant asked him not to. “As soon as word gets around you’ve finally shown up, it’s going to be chaos out there,” he said. “I had to promise the Prefect faithfully that we’d get you safely under cover before we broke the news.”
Addo cleared his throat. “While we’re on the subject of public order,” he said.
The Master’s assistant made a wide, airy gesture. “Oh, nothing like that here, I can promise you that. We’re all good Optimates in Luzir. No, you’re as safe as houses here. Well, so long as nobody sees you or finds out who you are, of course, otherwise you’d be hugged to death in five seconds flat.”
“Optimates?” Iseutz said.
The Master’s assistant hesitated and looked uncomfortable; it’s because she’s a girl, Giraut realised, presumably he’s not supposed to talk to strange women. “The Optimate party,” he said. “Politics. There’s Optimates and the KKA. We’re Optimates, where you’ve just come from is bedrock KKA country. That’s why they’ve had all that trouble.” He made it sound like a rather nasty disease, deliberately contracted. “But you don’t want to bother with all that. Fencing’s much bigger than politics in Luzir.” He grinned. “That’s why fencers are banned from standing in municipal elections, otherwise they’d be running the city. Almost certainly make a better job of it than the bunch of dead-heads we’ve got on the Board of Guardians right now, but that’s not saying much. Don’t repeat that,” he added. “As a Guild officer I’ve got to be completely impartial, of course.”
To make conversation, Giraut asked, “What does KKA stand for?”
“Kaloi kai agathoi,” the Master’s assistant replied, “that’s old Eastern Imperial for ‘the beautiful and the good’. Which is what Optimate means in old Western Imperial. Don’t ask,” he added, “it’s complicated. But basically, we hate them and they hate us. Only thing that ever kept this country together was the War. And fencing, of course, except that tends to split down party lines too. Luckily, we’ve got all the money, what there is of it. Right, we’re here.” The coach was slowing down. “Now, I’ll take you straight to the Calidarium. Constant hot water, day and night. I imagine you’d all like a nice hot bath,” he said, as Iseutz made a faint moaning noise.
There was a letter on top of the pile of fresh clean clothes waiting for Phrantzes in his room. He recognised the handwriting. He crossed the room in three long strides, snatched it up and froze. His hands were shaking so much he could hardly open it.
Sphagia to her Jilem, greetings.
They’ve let me go. I can hardly believe it. They told me I was going to have to spend the rest of my life in that place. But this morning the prioress came just after dawn prayers and told me, and now I’m back home, in our house.
I’m fine. Well, I think I’ve lost a stone and they cut off my hair – I’m so sorry, but I couldn’t do anything. It’ll grow back, I promise. I’ve done nothing but eat since I got home, I’d forgotten what real food tastes like. A horrible little man came round from the government – he said who he was but I didn’t take it in – and he brought me thirty nomismata, in a little linen bag. He didn’t say what it was for, just Sign here, so I did. Anyway, the point is, I’m fine, I’m safe and I’m all right for money. So please don’t worry about me.
They told me you were fine too and everything’s going really well. Are you, and is it? If you can possibly send a letter, please write soon. I miss you.
He tried to sit down, missed the bed and landed on the floor. He didn’t move. It was like waking up out of a bad dream. He tried to think about Suidas, the man he’d made up his mind to kill, in cold blood. Now the idea seemed absurd; and besides, Suidas had gone, Tzimisces had gone, the problem had dissolved in light and gone away, like those insuperable worries that gnaw at you in the early hours of the morning and seem so ridiculous when you remember them in daylight. He was in Luzir Beal, a civilised city, calm, under control and safe. In a day or so they’d have the fencing match, after which they’d go home. Sphagia was safe, he’d done his job and therefore earned his free pardon, and even if there was another war he was too old to be made to fight. Against his expectations, against all the odds he’d made it and come through.
He was too weak to stand up but it didn’t matter. He was perfectly happy kneeling on the floor for a while.
Later, he tried to tell them what he’d seen: the Aram Chantat slaughtering the Blueskins, the man whose coach they’d taken, all of it. They listened, but he got the impression they didn’t believe him but were too polite to say so.
“Anyway,” he concluded, “Suidas Deutzel felt he stood a better chance if he left us and made his own way here. He’d made his mind up, we couldn’t talk him out of it. So he left us and we came on.”
They looked at him. “If you could show us the place on a map,” said an old man with a neat white beard, “we can send a search party.”
“I’ll try,” Phrantzes said. “But I can’t promise anything. It’s pretty flat and featureless, so really, your guess is as good as mine.”
“Did he have food and water with him?” someone asked.
“I’m afraid not. We didn’t have any either, so there was nothing for him to take.”
They looked worried; he wanted to laugh, and tell them: it’s all right, we don’t want Suidas found, we want him to be dead out there somewhere, and no more harm to anyone. Later he tried to feel ashamed for thinking like that, but he couldn’t
. They showed him a map and he did try and make an honest guess. He could afford to, since the map meant nothing to him. “About here, I suppose,” he told them. “Somewhere around here, anyway.”
“How fast did the coach go, after you left him?”
“Hard to say,” Phrantzes replied, perfectly honestly. “Addo – Aduluscentulus Carnufex – he was driving, you could ask him. Some of the time the horses were going quite fast, sometimes the road was too rough and they were walking slowly. Someone who knows the road might be able to help you, but of course we’d never been there before.”
They quite understood and thanked him for his help, and he went to join the others in the Master’s day room. At the junction of two corridors, directly under a dazzling gold mosaic of a magnificent and entirely anonymous god, he met two of the men he’d been talking to earlier.
“There you are,” one of them said. “Good news. We’ve rescheduled the match for tomorrow night.”
Good news? Well, on balance, yes. The sooner it was all over and done with, the sooner they could all go home. All of them who survived the match, at any rate. “Splendid,” Phrantzes was therefore able to say. “That’s very good.”
“And we’ve shifted the venue to the Procopian arena,” the other one said. “It seats ten thousand, so we’ll be able to squeeze in two thousand more than if we held it here. It’s a very good arena,” he added, with a hint of pre-emptive attack in his voice. “Very fine acoustic, and it was almost completely rebuilt just last year, after the fire, so there’ll be no problems at all.”
If Phrantzes had been a horse, his ears would’ve gone back. But he smiled and nodded and mumbled, “Excellent, splendid,” and took a step forward. But they hadn’t finished with him yet.
“So all we need,” the first man said, “is your revised team.”
Phrantzes looked blank. “I’m sorry?”
“If Suidas Deutzel isn’t available,” the other one said, “obviously you’ll want to rearrange your team. I imagine one of your fencers will have to do longsword as well as his own discipline.”
Oh, Phrantzes thought. “Naturally,” he said. “I’ll discuss that with the team and get back to you as soon as I can.”
“That would be splendid, thank you.” Both of them beamed at him. “We’ll need to know fairly soon, of course, because of making the announcement. There’s a brief ceremony, nothing too arduous, but I expect there’ll be a big crowd. Shall we say tomorrow, at noon?”
As he’d anticipated, the news didn’t go down too well.
“You can rule me out,” Giraut said. “I wouldn’t fight longsword with foils, let alone sharps. No, I’m sorry.”
Phrantzes hadn’t been looking at him. He waited.
“No,” Addo said, after a long pause. “No, I’m very sorry, but I don’t think I can. Or if you really want me to fight longsword, someone else will have to do messer.” Phrantzes saw Giraut flinch out of the corner of his eye, and didn’t bother to turn his head. “And I think messer’s what they’ll be coming to see, so I’d better do that. You’ll just have to tell them we won’t be doing longsword, that’s all.”
This time, Phrantzes found himself in front of the entire Guild committee. They stared at him in silence for a long time.
“I’m afraid that’s not acceptable,” someone said at last. “I’m sorry, and I do understand how difficult it must be for you, though I do wonder why you came on this tour with no substitutes at all. Still, that’s not for me to comment on. But we must insist. Someone will have to fence longsword. I’m sure that once you’ve explained the position to your people, you’ll be able to sort something out.”
Pleading, Phrantzes guessed, wasn’t likely to get him anywhere; might as well beg the rain not to fall. “I’ll ask them,” he said, “but I really can’t promise anything.”
“We have every confidence in you,” they said, which didn’t help at all.
So he went back again, and there was a very long silence, with everybody looking away. Then Iseutz said, “But surely it’s obvious. You’ll have to do it.”
For a moment, Phrantzes couldn’t think who she was talking to. Then it hit him like a hammer.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Addo said, turning round and facing him. “Yes, that’s perfect, it’d solve everything.”
Phrantzes opened his mouth, but he couldn’t seem to get his voice to work. Iseutz was beaming at him. “We know you can do it,” she was saying, “we saw you fight Suidas, and if you can beat him, you can definitely handle some Permian.”
“For God’s sake.” The words came out high and squeaky. “I’m an old man, I’m out of training, I haven’t fought in competition for twenty years. I’ll be killed.”
Addo frowned. “I think you’re selling yourself short there,” he said. “Like Iseutz said, you showed you can handle yourself pretty well. And you didn’t just fend Suidas off, you beat him.”
Yes, but that’s because I wanted to kill him … He couldn’t say that. “It’s different in public,” was the best he could come up with, and it wasn’t really good enough. “What if they put me up against some young thug half my age and twice my height? I wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Giraut shook his head. “Longsword is all footwork,” he said. “You were moving pretty well against Suidas.”
“A big young thug is just the sort of opponent you want,” Addo said. “Muscle-bound and stupid. Work up your traverses a bit if you’re worried. And it’s definitely an advantage being the shorter man with longsword, you can close the distance and fight inside. Well, you don’t need me to tell you that.” He gave Phrantzes a reassuring smile. “As far as I can tell, the Permians are about thirty years behind the times as far as plays go, so you won’t have to worry about dealing with anything you haven’t met before. And stamina’s not an issue either, not like rapier. Keep it short and close, you’ll be fine.”
In desperation, Phrantzes tried to outflank. “Maybe if I fought rapier, and Giraut—”
“No.” Addo was completely firm, immovable. “He’s just said he’s not a longswordsman. But you are, you’ve proved it. The only other option is you fight messer and I’ll do longsword. But I think that’d be a rather bad idea.”
“And anyway,” Iseutz added, “it may not come to that. Suidas could still show up. They’ve got lots of men out looking for him. Maybe they’ll find him, and then all your troubles will be over.”
So he went to the committee and told them he’d be the longswordman. They gave him a startled look and told him that would be just fine. “In fact,” one of them said, with a strained expression on his face, “that’ll do very well. After all, we’ve promised them a Scherian national champion.”
“They always like it when someone comes out of retirement for one last match,” someone else added. “It gives the proceeedings that extra edge, don’t you find?”
They were taken to the Guild armoury to choose their weapons. It was in the basement, down five flights of narrow, winding stone stairs, worn slippery smooth and indifferently lit by horn lanterns in wall niches. At the foot of the stairs was a bronze door, which took two sets of keys to unlock and two men to pull open. Beyond the door was a vast natural cavern, lit by two shafts of light falling through glazed windows in the far-distant roof. The walls crawled with translucent limestone crusts, but “We don’t seem to have a problem with damp,” their guide assured them, “so long as we keep stuff well away from the walls.”
It was a museum, an art gallery and a temple, and a prison, and a grave. The free-standing racks were in the middle of the cavern, directly under the light, which was dazzling against the surrounding darkness. The light was good enough for reading the smallest, most worn inscriptions – makers’ names, presentations to honour victories and retirements, incantations to gods and Good Luck, bold on the spines of blades or nestling in thickets of acanthus-and-scroll engraving on ricassos or in the troughs of fullers. The longswords were stored upright, their quillons supported by pegs, s
o that they hung without the points touching anything, to guard against flex and set. The rapiers and smallswords rested horizontally, supported on five hooks. The messers – five messers to every longsword or rapier – sat by the dozen in buckets of black oil, like flowers in water. “Suidas would’ve loved this,” Iseutz hissed to Addo, who grinned.
“Help yourselves,” their guide said.
Addo pulled a messer at random from the nearest bucket and looked round for something to wipe the blade with. Giraut went slowly along the row of rapiers, lifting them, gauging the weight, resting them on the side of the knuckle of his left index finger to determine the centre of balance, holding them upright and smacking the blade with the flat of his hand to find the sweet spot for blocking. Phrantzes stood gawping for a long time, then took down a slim, long-handled Type Eighteen longsword, fumbled it and dropped it on the floor, jumped out of the way like a startled lamb, stooped, picked it up quickly and said, “This’ll do fine,” without examining it any further. Iseutz stared for a long time without touching, and finally chose a silver-hilted colichemarde, old-fashioned and a little heavy but very strong in the forte for binds and parries. “Are there any foils?” she asked. “You know, for practising.”
Clearly she’d said something embarrassing, but their guide was too well mannered to explain. “I believe we’ve got some,” he said, “in the salle in the east court. It’s where the juniors train,” he couldn’t help adding. “I think the under-thirteens use them.”
