Sharps

by K. J. Parker

  It was a long way to the east court. The salle smelt of sweat, wet wool and boiled cabbage, and the polished wooden floor was painted with lines and circles, neatly annotated with numbers and letters, to help instructors explain to novices where they should be putting their feet. The foils turned out to be wooden, ancient, battered, haphazardly mended with bandage, rawhide and glue. But they’d been good quality once upon a time; the weights and balances were just right, and Addo said, “That’s fine, thank you,” in a brisk, crisp voice. “Can we use this room for practising?”

  Their guide looked mildly horrified. “Well, yes, if you like. But we’ve set aside the Long Hall for you. It’s where we usually hold training sessions before major competitions.”

  “This will do us just fine,” Iseutz said firmly. “Could you possibly get them to send us in some food? And if you could rustle up a few masks and gloves, that’d be wonderful.”

  The guide clearly didn’t trust himself to reply to such an infamous suggestion; he scuttled away, leaving them in undisputed possession of their new territory. Once he’d gone, a feeling of unaccountable calm settled over them, as though they’d really won a significant victory. Iseutz walked across the floor and carefully put her feet on 4 and 6. “This is actually a rather intelligent way of teaching footwork,” she announced, looking down the dotted lines painted on the floor. “I wish I’d had something like this when I was learning.”

  “We’ve got something a bit like it at home,” Addo said, his mind clearly elsewhere. “Smaller, though.” He was picking at a lump of encrusted grease on the blade of his messer. “Top of the north tower at the country house. It’s a good room for a salle, because it’s circular and it catches the light.”

  Phrantzes picked up a longsword foil, closed his eyes and took up a high back guard. Addo cleared his throat, though Phrantzes didn’t seem to hear. “Ready whenever you are,” Addo said. No reaction. He said it again.

  “Excuse me?” Phrantzes opened his eyes and stared at him.

  “Sparring,” Addo said. “You and me. Help get you warmed up and into the swing of it, so to speak.”

  “I’ll just do a few exercises, thanks,” Phrantzes replied. He closed his eyes again, and flowed into a wide left traverse combined with a transition from front middle to high right. Addo had never seen it done better.

  Giraut found a silhouette of a spread-eagled man stencilled on a wall. There were little white numbers to mark the preferred targets. He amused himself with it for a while, only thinking of a number once he’d committed to the lunge, transferring his weight to a foot hanging in mid air. He hit seven out of ten just right, and two more close enough for business. He knew that if he did another ten, he’d end up trying too hard and miss, so he looked round for Iseutz, who was playing a complex form of geometrical hopscotch with the numbers on the floor. “Fancy a few points?” he asked her. She thought about it for rather longer than he’d have thought the decision would take, then said, “All right. Actually, I need to practise passatas, if you don’t mind getting killed for a bit.”

  Giraut shrugged. “Fine,” he said. “Then can we do a few voltes?”

  She frowned. “You’re really good at the volte. You don’t need to practise.”

  “Yes, but I like doing them.”

  Addo spent some time on the eight cuts, starting slow and speeding up, but practice was making him worse instead of better, so he stopped and watched the others for a while. Giraut was making an effort to help Iseutz, who was concentrating hard and improving with each reiteration. Phrantzes, as far as he could tell, was fighting a complex and difficult battle against an unseen opponent; not just a random set of moves, there was a narrative to it, and from time to time the invisible enemy came up with something Phrantzes struggled to deal with, though he was doing extremely well. His eyes were tight shut, and as often as not his feet were landing precisely on the numbers. Addo could see two weaknesses in his style; nothing fatal, but worth mentioning. He decided to do it later, when the invisible fight was over. Assuming, of course, that Phrantzes survived.

  He heard a snapping sound and looked round. Giraut had closed Iseutz against the wall and gone for a big lunge. She’d demivolted (Giraut’s best move) and prodded him gently in the ribs as he sailed past; he’d driven his foil into the wall with considerable force and snapped it. Iseutz laughed, which wasn’t really the best thing to do. Giraut scowled horribly at her and walked away to join Addo.

  “You were doing so well, too,” Addo said.

  “It’s because she’s a girl,” Giraut said ruefully, “I couldn’t resist trying to crowd her. Serves me right, I suppose.”

  “Yes,” Addo said, and threw Giraut the wooden messer he’d been holding. Giraut caught it perfectly by the handle; so perfectly it startled him, and he looked down at it in his hand. “Would you mind?” Addo said.

  “Sure,” Giraut replied, and swung furiously at Addo’s head. He just managed to avoid it, ducking his head instead of moving his feet. “Ready when you are,” he said, and Giraut grinned at him. “I’ll just attack, if that’s all right,” Giraut said. “I can dish it out, but I can’t take it.”

  “That’ll be just fine,” Addo replied, and traversed well to get out of the way of a rising left-to-right that would’ve smashed his jaw into splinters. He had no trouble after that, and eventually Giraut had to stop to catch his breath.

  “Horrible thing,” he said, twirling the wooden messer over the back of his hand. “It makes you want to hit someone with it, really hard.”

  Addo nodded. “Talking of which,” he said, “I hope he’s all right.”

  “Oh, he’ll be fine,” Giraut said uneasily. “It’s whoever he runs into on the way I feel sorry for.”

  “We should’ve gone back for him,” Addo said firmly, then darted back and left to avoid a crushing downward cut to the head. “Steady on,” he said reprovingly, then threw himself to the right as Giraut drove the messer straight at his face.

  “Is it all right if I stop for a moment?” Giraut asked. “I’m out of breath.”

  Addo grinned at him. “You’re out of breath,” he said. “No, that’s fine. You can—”

  Giraut swung again, and Addo froze. He hadn’t been expecting it, and for a fraction of a second he stared at the heavy wooden toy coming straight at him. Giraut tried to check the blow or pull it off course, but there simply wasn’t time. He opened his mouth to scream—

  And Addo had caught the blade, snapped it between his palms and jerked it sideways, plucking it out of Giraut’s hand. Giraut stumbled forward and crashed into him; his jaw hit Addo’s shoulder, and he felt his bottom teeth crush against his lower lip. He reeled backwards and tried to mumble an apology, but his mouth was full of blood. He wobbled, and Addo reached out and caught him, gently steadied him on his feet and then let go. He still had the wooden messer in his left hand.

  “Sorry,” Giraut said.

  “No, that’s fine,” Addo said. “Are you all right? There’s blood …”

  “Just bit my lip, that’s all,” Giraut mumbled. “Listen, really, I didn’t mean …”

  “That’s fine,” Addo repeated firmly. “I know precisely how it feels. Even a wooden one, you just want to swing it and see what happens.” He dropped the messer on the floor and pushed it away with his foot. “Apparently,” he said, “most rural Permians carry one of the damn things with them wherever they go. It’s a miracle there’s anybody left alive in this appalling country.”

  Addo and Phrantzes fought a point. Phrantzes started off with a feint and a furious lunge and carried on attacking, like the sea crashing against a cliff, until one of his swirling from-the-roof shots just clipped the bottom of the lobe of Addo’s left ear. Addo immediately called a hit, dropped his foil and took two long steps back. “You win,” he panted, wiping sweat out of his eyes.

  Phrantzes looked stunned. “Really?”

  “No question.” He dabbed two fingers to his ears, then held them out. “You see? Actual b
lood. Point and match.”

  Phrantzes put his back to the wall and slid down it on to the floor. “I can’t keep that up,” he said. “I just don’t have the strength.”

  Addo sat next to him. “No, you’re doing exactly the right thing. Keep on at him, in his face, like you were doing just then. If you’ve only got a limited amount of energy, it’d be crazy to waste it defending. Just make sure you keep tight inside, and carry on attacking till you get him.”

  “It’s not going to work. I can’t do it.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Addo said, gingerly rubbing his ear. It was bright red and swollen, and Giraut reckoned he could feel the heat radiating from it from the other side of the room. “Also, he won’t be expecting it. Try and look really old and frail immediately before the start, and then go for the bastard. He won’t stand a chance.”

  A brief ceremony, at noon, in the Procopian arena; nothing too arduous, they’d said. To get there, they were taken out through the kitchens and the stable yard just after first light and herded into a laundry cart, a rickety old thing with high wicker sides, into which bales of dirty washing were dropped from the upper windows. Cunning craftsmen had installed a false floor about halfway up the sides, creating a hidden compartment, with a low door for access, in which a small man could just about sit without bowing his head. Once they were in, the door was closed and bolted behind them, and the cart drove round the quadrangle; every time a bale of laundry hit the floor above their heads, the cart shook, until Iseutz said she’d never realised before what a thoroughly rotten time anvils must have. Addo, squashed up against the side, used the blade of his penknife to prise a small loophole in the wickerwork.

  “The gate’s opening,” he told the others, “we’re going through. I can’t … Dear God.”

  “What?” Iseutz snapped.

  “There’s so many people.”

  If he’d been sitting on top of the gatehouse tower, instead of crouching in a cart at ground level, he’d have got a rather better impression of the scale of the crowd that had gathered outside the Guild house during the night. It filled the broad street on all four sides; the proverbial squirrel could’ve made a complete circuit of the building across the shoulders of the crowd without even having to jump. The main thoroughfares leading to Guildhouse Square were jammed for half a mile in both directions – everybody in the crush knew they hadn’t got a hope of getting close enough to see the Guild house wall, let alone the fencers coming or going, but clearly they felt an overwhelming need to be there, as near as they could get, strong enough to justify the discomfort and the very real danger of being smothered, crushed or trampled to death. There were no guards or soldiers anywhere in sight, but that wasn’t a problem. The crowd was too monstrously compacted together for anyone to raise a violent hand or throw a missile.

  The laundry cart made its way through the crowd at the pace of water percolating through heavy cloth, until eventually it was able to turn off down a reasonably empty alley, the first stage in a horribly slow and tortuous progression through the rats’ nest of alleys, snickets, yards and entries that eventually brought them to Victory Square, where the walls of the Procopian arena towered over the surrounding rooftops like a singularly ugly hat. There were crowds there too, seventy-five yards deep, so they had to go back into the alley maze and tack and trim south by south-east until they came to the boundary wall of the old Governor’s mansion, a high-sided grey box the size of a modest arable farm. There was a sally port in the wall just big enough for the cart to squeeze through (they felt the wheel hubs foul the gateposts on the way through) and then they were in an artificial canyon between the outer and inner defensive walls, rolling quickly across immaculately mown lawns. After about a quarter of a mile they turned right into a long tunnel, and finally came out into the light on the floor of the arena itself. A worried-looking man in a pale green robe opened the door for them. “About time,” he muttered, as he bundled them out into the painfully bright sun. “We were beginning to wonder where the hell you’d got to.”

  They’d been in the coach for four hours, which left just under an hour before the start of the brief, not-too-arduous ceremony. “We need to get you safely under cover before we open the gates,” somebody explained. “If they catch sight of you before we’ve got the barriers up, it’ll be a bloodbath.”

  Across fifteen acres of sand to a vast pillared gateway, to the left of which was a tiny hidden door, leading to a corkscrew wooden stair that brought them out on a plank-floored platform high up on the wall. Beyond that was a narrow catwalk with a rope handrail, which led to a door in the side of a square tower built against the wall. They found themselves on a landing at the top of a long, broad flight of marble steps, at the foot of which an open door leaked light. There were three folding chairs and a table on the landing. “Take a seat,” their guide told them as he walked away, “and for crying out loud stay put and don’t even think of wandering off. If you do, we can’t guarantee your safety.”

  Giraut, Phrantzes and Iseutz took the chairs. Addo perched uncomfortably on the edge of the table, whose legs bent visibly under his weight. From outside came a noise, vague but deafening, somewhere between a furious argument in the Senate and the muted growl of the sea. They sat in silence for what seemed like a very long time, hardly daring to move. From time to time a trumpet sounded, and there were a number of inexplicable loud bangs and crashes, as if a wall had collapsed or someone was using a battering ram on a bronze door. Giraut leaned across and whispered to Phrantzes (he didn’t quite dare speak out loud, in case the mob heard him and stormed the tower): “What exactly have we got to do in this ceremony?”

  “No idea,” Phrantzes replied. “I did ask, but they didn’t answer.”

  Iseutz made an exasperated noise and muttered something about standing up in front of ten thousand people looking like a windmill; she had a point, Giraut was prepared to concede, because the clothes she’d been issued with didn’t exactly flatter her. The most charitable explanation was that they still hadn’t figured out she wasn’t a man, but it was hard to think of any justification, however fanciful, for the cut of the sleeves. If she were to stand on a high place on a windy day and spread her arms, there’d be no knowing where she was likely to end up. But his own outfit wasn’t much better, so his sympathy was muted. Phrantzes, in spite of his clothes, still looked exactly the same as always, and Addo – well, until you got to know him quite well, you had difficulty noticing he was there at all.

  Trumpets blared directly overhead, and the crowd roared. Addo mouthed Sounds like something’s happening, and a man appeared in the doorway they’d come in through, beckoning furiously and scowling. “All right,” Phrantzes yelled, “we’re ready.” The man looked horrified and put his finger to his lips, then scampered down the broad staircase without looking back.

  “Well,” Giraut shouted in Addo’s ear, “do we follow him or what?”

  Addo shrugged, then set off down the stairs. The man had reached the bottom; he looked back at them and thrashed his arms above his head, as though fighting off a swarm of three-inch bees. I guess so, Addo mimed, and he led the way, the other three trailing wretchedly behind him. A moment later, they stumbled through the doorway, and the sunlight hit them like a hammer.

  “That was it?” Iseutz demanded furiously, as they were thrust back into the laundry cart. “That was all? Two minutes …”

  Addo ducked and compressed himself into the seat next to her. “Plenty enough for me, thank you. I’m just glad it’s over.”

  Giraut’s ears were still ringing. “Did you see the size of the place?” he said. “It’s vast. How is anybody going to see anything when we fence there tomorrow?”

  “Two minutes.” Iseutz was white with rage. “All that misery, just to walk out, shake hands with an old man and walk back in again. These people are—”

  “Enthusiastic,” Addo said, with a smile. “Oh come on, it wasn’t that bad. We didn’t have to make speeches or anything.”
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  “Just as well Suidas wasn’t here,” Iseutz said. “He’d have—”

  She stopped short, and nobody spoke until they’d been moving for several minutes. Then Giraut said, “Addo, what can you see?”

  “Nothing,” Addo replied. “Someone’s been in here and filled in the hole I made. Now that’s attention to detail. My father would definitely approve.”

  “Make another one,” Iseutz commanded, but he shook his head. “Twice would be rude,” he said, “especially since they’ve made it clear it’s not allowed.”

  Another long silence. After a minute or so at walking pace, they’d slowed to a crawl. “Do you think he’s all right?” Giraut said. “Really?”

  “If anybody could make it, Suidas could,” Addo said firmly.

  “They’d have found him by now,” Iseutz said, “if he was still alive.”

  “Not at all,” Giraut said angrily. “There’s miles and miles of open country, he could be anywhere.”

  “Even I could’ve walked to Beal from there by now,” Iseutz snapped back. “Face it, Giraut, we won’t be seeing him again. And it’s his own bloody stupid fault.”

  Addo shook his head. “I should’ve—”

  “His own fault,” Iseutz repeated grimly. “If you’d tried to stop him, he’d probably have attacked you. It was obvious he was that close to losing it completely.”

  “Maybe he’s gone home,” Giraut said.

  Addo frowned, and Iseutz looked at him. “That’s a thought,” Addo said. “Maybe he has, at that. Which would explain why they haven’t found him, if he doesn’t want to be found.”

  Phrantzes started to say something, then put his hand over his mouth. His eyes were wide open.

  “He said we should come here, though,” Iseutz said.

  “Changed his mind,” Giraut said eagerly. “Knowing Suidas, he figured that on his own he’d be able to make it through. Yes, I bet you that’s what’s happened. After all, if he’s dead, surely they’d have found the body.”