Chronicles of Galadria II - Encounters

by David Gay-Perret

  Glaide nodded, though that all seemed terribly abstract and difficult to grasp. As if he could read his thoughts, Kezthrem sighed, then conceded, “The fact that you come from another world will prevent you from truly understanding everything I’ve just said. The few attacks you’ve experienced have been unexceptional, but any of them could have cost you your life, especially your encounter with the black orks. But just try to apply what I’ve said until the day that you can truly measure and understand the magnitude of an ork’s strength, and the danger that it represents.”

  “I’ll do my best, master,” responded the adolescent.

  “Good. Now, let us study your weapon. And by that, I mean your sword, not this wooden one. This one is only for training.”

  Glaide set down the wooden piece on the ground, then made his own weapon appear.

  “What you hold in your hands is a double-sided blade,” began Kezthrem, looking at his own blade. “It is important that you be able to make use of that characteristic. To do that, it is enough to simply remember that whatever angle your adversary attacks from, you can strike him without having to make any great movements to bring the sharp end towards him.”

  “Naturally,” thought the young man.

  “The second thing to make note of, and which is far more important, is the length of this sword. It is almost forty-five inches long, and the hilt is nearly a foot long. That length should not cause problems, though; much to the contrary, it will allow you an advantage when you fight adversaries with shorter swords. The school of Iretane uses a two-handed technique, and even in times of war, you should not hope to use a shield or anything of the sort in your other hand. But then again, if you truly master this technique, you’ll need nothing like that. Iretane will be enough to cover your needs, both to attack and to defend.”

  “I certainly never imagined being able to fight while holding such a weapon in just one hand, anyway,” thought Glaide with a smile.

  “Now, listen well,” continued Kezthrem. “I’m going to explain to you exactly what the style I teach is made up of. We will start at the beginning. The school of Iretane was created five hundred years ago by a man whose name has been lost. He taught the technique to just one protector who, in turn, taught it to his own disciples. The appearance of this technique occurred simultaneously with the arrival of Novak the Liberator, who created a number of other styles himself. The unique and principal feature of Iretane is simply this: to allow a protector to wield white magic that his magg has imbued his sword with, much the same as with eorens. You had a demonstration of that with Tyv and Paeh.”

  Glaide nodded.

  “However, that is not what you will learn here, with me.”

  “What?” exclaimed the adolescent, stunned.

  “I cannot teach you this for a very simple reason: Emily is not here with us.”

  “Of course,” thought the young man, feeling disappointment fill him. “I should have thought of that... How on earth could I expect to learn how to master the use of white magic, when I have no source of it around me?”

  “In that case,” he said out loud, “what will we do?”

  “Don’t worry,” declared Kezthrem, unable to hide his smile. “There is plenty to learn without that. Naturally, sooner or later, we will need to work with the young woman, but for now, there are still things to do. I’m going to teach you the basics of combat: the types of attack that exist, which situations they work best in... I’ll hone your reflexes and speed, and train you so that you know how to keep track of exactly where your opponents are at any given moment. You have to know how to conduct yourself in combat, without necessarily using the special techniques of Iretane. Never forget this one thing, Glaide: before being able to employ magic or any special attacks, a warrior has to know how to wield his weapon. And that is what you need to learn: how to wield your sword in the Iretane style.”

  “I’m not sure I understand, master,” interjected the boy, who really understood next to nothing of what his master was saying.

  “Everything will be made clear as we practice. For the moment, what you have to keep in mind is that the goal of Iretane is to strike your adversary before he has the opportunity to attack you. For example, you should be able to pierce his body in the moment when he lifts his sword to attack. In any case, that is what should happen when you find yourself in combat, faced with multiple enemies. Plus, you should be able to parry well; that is something that you never need to avoid, since the size of your sword guarantees a certain amount of security there. Above all, the subtle advantage of this school resides in parrying well, while also launching precise attacks; you should be able to parry an attack from one opponent, while executing a counter attack on another, probably behind you, hitting your enemy while his own attack leaves him open and undefended.”

  “So everything, then, is based on speed,” concluded Glaide. “But that doesn’t make very much sense in light of the type of weapon we have.”

  “You’re not wrong. So from that fact, you should draw this: every one of your blows must be powerful, deadly. You must, theoretically, be able to kill an adversary with a single blow.”

  “I see. One attack, one death,” summarized the young man, with all of the common sense that characterized his personality. Kezthrem smiled.

  “More or less. Now, let’s look at what happens when you fight against a single enemy. Imagine that he is fast, powerful, and has great stamina.”

  “That would be a complete nightmare,” murmured the adolescent.

  “But a nightmare that you could face. And faced with such an opponent, you would have to bank on your ability to dodge. Knowing how to block the strikes that you cannot escape, and how to dodge the others, would become vital. Besides that, your own attacks could lose none of their power if you wanted to injure your adversary.”

  “Right. I see what you’re trying to say,” declared Glaide. “So then, learning all of this will be an uphill climb...” Kezthrem nodded.

  “First of all, you have to learn to understand the reach of your weapon, and the dimensions of the specimen that you hold in your hands. That will allow you to know in the future exactly how far off you should keep an enemy to remain successful. But better still is for us to begin with a few basic attacks. Then, bit by bit, you will learn all of these skills.”

  The boy nodded, made his sword disappear, and picked up his wooden saber, while his master did the same.

  “First of all, let me show you a powerful technique that proves dangerous for the attacker, which in this case is you. Watch carefully.” The man took up a guard stance, then moved his back leg forwards while slicing his blade downward through the empty space in front of him. “What shortcoming does this blow have, Glaide?” he demanded.

  The adolescent thought for a moment, then replied, “You leave your body open to attack, because you raise your arms to increase the strength of the blow.”

  “Exactly. That is why it is necessary that you only use such an attack if you know you can take out your enemy with a single blow. With a weapon like yours, you could easily slice through a helmet, along with the skull within. It is the most basic of our movements. Easy to execute, it requires only speed and precision. We will not practice this blow together; it will be up to you to repeat it as much or as little as you like, eventually using that practice in place of your current, muscle-building exercises. It is imperative that you get used to the weight of your blade as it moves, even if that is something you’ve already dealt with in the past.”

  “Excellent, master,” interjected the young man enthusiastically, relieved that things were finally starting to move along. So, what should we practice together, now, then?”

  “Right now, we’re going to eat. It’s already past noon.”

  Glaide smiled.

  “And then,” continued the man, unperturbed, “we’ll review the guard position.”

  And that is what they did. The two quickly ate a light lunch, then returned to training. Kezthrem
soon decided that the guard stance of his disciple was quite good. The blade trembled a little in his hands, and his shoulders became tired quickly, but the stance would protect him effectively enough. The man decided to combine the stance with a few simple attacks, specifically from the right, left, and from below. This idea worked well for Glaide, because by seeing the attacks that he was training to protect himself from, he understood better how important the guard stance was, and how effective it was. With that stance, he offered his enemies only a thin profile to attack, thus providing his adversary with little opportunity. Holding the weapon high protected his head, and due to its length, also a good part of his torso. At the same time, from that position, he could easily attack and move in all directions.

  The young disciple spent two or three days working on his defense and simple techniques. Kezthrem often moved in front of him and launched an attack, to see if he was producing a movement correctly. In the process, Glaide collected a few bruises, but it was obvious that his short time studying with Uziere had already borne fruit; he was soon able to move on to the next step of his training. And his master did not make him wait long.

  At the next lesson, they began working on ways of dodging, an aspect of combat that was easily as important as parrying. In a few minutes, the man summarized what dodging consisted of. There was actually little to say on the subject, and after explaining that it simply meant anticipating the attack of one’s enemy, then moving out of reach, the two passed into practice, which was considerably more complicated. This time, the results were much less positive. Glaide didn’t seem to have any skill at predicting what was about to happen.

  He moved forwards and backwards, mainly relying on luck, and hoping that his master wouldn’t attack where he moved. However, the opposite happened more times than not, and the young man gained several more bruises. Beyond that, the size of the blade used against him told him nothing, and the boy was never sure if he was out of its reach or not.

  On top of that, so that their training time wouldn’t become too boring, Kezthrem took care to always teach a couple of things at once. So then, while working on his dodging, guard positions, and basic attacks, Glaide also had to remember several blow combinations, with the goal of being able to be able to mix them up, rather than simply use them as is. A single fight, though it may be quick, often enough, could also end up being very long – as his master often said – so he had to be able to vary how he combined techniques so that the entire battle could be a single chain of efficiently composed movements, both of attack and defense. Glaide took little time to think as he repeated Kezthrem’s movements; instead, he tried to make them reflexive. He wanted to be able to react promptly and efficiently to any attack against him.

  So then, it was an all-encompassing and highly varied training, which the adolescent followed joyfully, whatever its difficulty level. He had dreamed of moments like this from the time Rackk was destroyed, and he had become very aware of his weakness, so that he delighted in his studies, and the effort required did nothing but improve his motivation. Already, he could imagine confronting battalions of blood-thirsty monsters. “Soon, I’ll be ready,” he thought every night, just before falling asleep.

  Chapter 25

  A week passed that way, without the adolescent noticing. He’d soon mastered a few of the basic attacks, and despite the chains of choreographed movements becoming more and more arduous and lengthy, he soon moved on to employing diagonal attacks. Kezthrem explained the importance of that briefly, insisting above all that diagonal movements were more difficult to block, and that by slicing from shoulder to hip, or back the other way, a warrior forced his adversary to move constantly, to avoid the attack.

  The training sessions began to gain momentum, and though Glaide often trained on his own in the empty space in the middle of the dojo, he also had plenty of opportunities to add notches to the wooden training dummies in the back, and on more rare occasions, his master himself acted as his adversary. Glaide found that he no longer tried to simply withstand an attack, but to also create openings, to dodge, and to include the many little things that made combat what it really was: an art.

  At the beginning, the boy was astonished at the speed at which his master moved through the lessons. He even feared that it was all going too quickly, and that he was only learning things superficially, but he soon realized that wasn’t the case: he realized that he knew how to effectively use a number of attacks. The difficulty, though, lay in making those attacks without being struck himself. Glaide quickly came to understand that his master had taught him only an infinitesimal part of everything he needed to learn. Besides which, it would take time to be able to use all of the techniques he’d learned correctly and well.

  One evening towards the beginning of November, Kezthrem showed his disciple another side of Iretane. That evening, the boy climbed the stairs to go to bed, all the while thinking back over his progress. The most important thing, without contest, was that he was starting to become more aware of how far his weapon reached, and not just of his practice with his master, since that was usually with wooden swords, but rather due to the many attacks he launched into thin air with his own sword, constantly repeating the same movement over and over, as Kezthrem had told him to do.

  For a bit of extra practice, he combined about thirty of the same attack, moving from high to low, then dropped down on to his futon, barely out of breath. “It seems like I’m making progress with my stamina,” he said with a smile. Then, he fell soundly asleep.

  Much of the night had already passed when the young man awoke with a start. Something was scraping at his neck. When he opened his eyes, the vision he saw before him made him jump, almost causing him to slice his own throat on the slender blade held less than inch above him. Beside the bed of the young man, illuminated by the pale light of the moon, he saw Kezthrem, weapon in hand. He moved the steel suddenly away from his disciple.

  “What on earth...” sputtered the young man, his voice thick with sleep.

  “You’re dead,” replied his master simply. With that, he passed through the door connecting his room to his student’s and disappeared. The boy was left with his heart beating furiously, and it took him awhile to calm down. When he finally found himself able to breath normally again, the lesson was clear, even to his sleep-fogged mind: from this point on, he would have to learn to sleep with one eye open, to avoid being surprised like that. It made him remember traveling to find the dwarves, and his fear of spending the night in the middle of a field, without any protection. “This new aspect of my training may prove quite useful,” he thought to himself, before going back to sleep.

  The next day, Kezthrem made no mention of the event, as was his habit. “I suppose he’s simply assumed that I’ve drawn the necessary conclusions,” Glaide told himself. And that was indeed the truth. In fact, he found himself so impatient to develop the skill of detecting his enemies in his sleep, that he proved to be particularly zealous in the attempt: the evening following the incident, he decided not to sleep at all. It was nearly midnight before he realized he was beginning to understand his master, and that his master never seemed to repeat something twice, let alone twice in such a short amount of time. He decided to make sure, though, just in case.

  In the end, he couldn’t even enjoy the magnificent display of dawn, because he was so exhausted, and when his training began, as it did every day, it seemed almost interminable. The whole thing was quite an ordeal: when he tried to dodge, he instead found himself sprawled across the floor, having tripped over nothing. As for the choreographed attacks... The results of those attempts were no better; he couldn’t memorize anything. When it came time to attack the grappling dummy, his blows fell weakly, imprecisely, and inefficiently.

  The adolescent finally decided to move on to the one thing he could do correctly: sleep. He went to bed early, not caring at all whether or not Kezthrem might be considering making another attack. Besides which, in his current state, he’d probably conti
nue to snore even if a blade passed right through his body.

  The man made no attack, however – or at least, as far as the adolescent knew – and the next day passed with fewer problems. Kezthrem didn’t try anything that whole week, and the one that followed was just as calm – so much so, that Glaide began to wonder if the exercise was over the moment he failed it.

  Glaide took advantage of those two weeks to work his hardest at everything his master asked of him. He had already learned a pattern of at least fifteen techniques by heart, and he was beginning to work on the technical aspect of each movement, concentrating on becoming faster and more accurate, instead of concentrating on what movement should come next. He knew that he needed to be able to move about, while remaining rapid and precise. The whole experience helped him understand how important it was to have a master to learn from – someone who regularly took the time to watch what his disciple was doing, and who would sometimes place himself before his student at the beginning of a pattern, correcting each movement. The process of performing and correcting a pattern would often take all morning or afternoon, but the adolescent made significant progress, especially as he came to understand how each attack or defense should be carried out.

  One day, while they were in the middle of dodging practice – where Glaide continued to fail consistently – Kezthrem taught him something that would make it easier for him. The two stood facing each other, and, with a wooden sword, the man attempted to decapitate the adolescent. Since Glaide was unarmed, he had to bend his knees to lower himself out of the way. Yet again, he proved too slow, and again, his adversary stopped his attack just a hair away from his neck.