by K. J. Parker
The news, Colsceg announced, was good. They’d been up on the roof (what, already? It was only just daylight, for pity’s sake) and they’d been right, the damage was far less severe than it looked; two days’ work, three at the outside, and the place would be habitable. Egil would be out of action for a while, but everyone else was back on their feet; a few bandages here and there and some pretty odd-looking beards and eyebrows, but nothing to worry about. Certainly not enough to justify cancelling the games—
‘Games?’ Poldarn echoed.
Colsceg pulled one of those oh-for-crying-out-loud faces Poldarn had come to know so well. ‘Games,’ Colsceg repeated. ‘Sports. Trials of strength and skill, to celebrate the wedding. It’s a poor heart that never rejoices,’ he added, as if reciting a particularly solemn passage from scripture.
‘Oh, good,’ Poldarn said, grateful that his thoughts on the subject were strictly private. ‘When’s that, then?’
After having known Poldarn for several weeks, it was surprising that Colsceg could still be so shocked at the man’s ignorance. ‘Well, now, of course. That’s what we’re here for. We’ve brought all the gear, and they’re putting up the ring.’ He paused, asking Providence under his breath to give him strength. ‘So you’re not ready, then.’
Poldarn shrugged. ‘I suppose I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. I don’t know if I’m any good at sports. Maybe I should sit out and just watch and give the prizes or something.’
‘No, that’s completely wrong,’ Colsceg snapped, then reined in his temper with an effort. ‘It’s you against all comers, that’s the whole point. It’s traditional,’ he added, as if capping off an argument with a direct quote from the statute-book. ‘When you say you’re no good at sports—’
‘Actually,’ Poldarn interrupted, mostly out of devilment, ‘I didn’t say that. I said I don’t know. Could be I’m brilliant at them. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.’
One thing Colsceg was gaining from his alliance with the Haldersness mob was a vastly increased ability to stay patient. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Well, when you’re ready.’
‘No time like the present,’ Poldarn said. ‘Lead on.’
They’d already marked out the ring with ground chalk mixed with water; now they were sharpening stakes and hammering them in with a post-rammer. They’d cut the rails already and laid them by, handy to be nailed on to the stakes to complete the circle. ‘We thought we’d start with javelin-throwing,’ Colsceg said, ‘it’s fairly gentle, good one to warm up on. Then the weightlifting, axe-throwing, heavy running—’
‘Heavy running? What’s that?’
‘You run five times round the ring carrying a half-hundredweight sack of coal. Light running’s the same, but without the sack. We thought we’d do the light running after the log-chopping.’
I’ve got to do all this, Poldarn thought, me against all comers. Bloody hell. ‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘Is that it, or is there more?’
‘Well, yes,’ Colsceg said. ‘After the light running, we’ll have the wrestling, quarterstaff, shying at marks and single-stick, and finally the home game to round off with. If that’s all right with you,’ Colsceg added.
‘Oh, fine,’ Poldarn replied; and as he said it he was thinking, If I say I’ve done my ankle after the third event, which probably won’t be too far from the truth, they’ll have to let me off the rest and I’ll have shown willing, which is the main thing, surely. ‘Actually, now you mention it, I guess I’m quite looking forward to this.’
Nothing to indicate which of his questions and statements had been the most offensive, but Colsceg sighed and walked away. Somehow, Boarci contrived to materialise out of thin air just behind his shoulder. ‘How’s you, then?’ he muttered.
‘What?’ Poldarn turned round. ‘Oh, I’m fine.’
Boarci was grinning like an elderly sheepdog. ‘Sleep well?’
‘Yes,’ Poldarn replied accurately. ‘I wish someone had told me about all this, I could’ve made up an excuse to get out of it.’
‘Selfish bugger, aren’t you?’ Boarci replied. ‘It’s the best part of a wedding, this: making the bridegroom look really useless in front of his new bride. They’re all looking forward to it.’
‘You included, by the sound of it.’
‘Too right. I’m really looking forward to the quarterstaff. They told you about that?’
Poldarn shook his head, which was hurting even more than before.
‘It’s a good laugh, the quarterstaff. They put up these two trestles with a thin plank between them, and you stand at one end, the other guy’s at the other end, and you’ve both got big ash poles to hit each other with. Actually, there’s a lot of skill involved, takes years to learn. Anyway, the object is to knock the other man off the plank, and there’s a big pile of rocks underneath for him to land on. Hurts like shit. I’m bloody good with the staff, say so myself as shouldn’t.’
‘I see,’ Poldarn said. ‘So what happens if I lose? Presumably whoever wins stays up.’
Boarci laughed. ‘Don’t you wish. No, it’s like he said, you against all comers. You get knocked down, you just pick yourself up and get back on, ready for the next challenger. If there’s time, we get to go round again. Didn’t it ever occur to you why I’m still a bachelor?’
There were seven entries besides Poldarn for the javelin-throwing. Six of them out-threw him by a rather offensive margin; he rather hoped that the seventh, Eyvind, had deliberately thrown short as a gesture of solidarity, but being realistic he reckoned it probably had more to do with the thick wads of bandages on both Eyvind’s hands. Whatever the reason, he contrived to ace Eyvind’s throw by a whole two inches. All nine other competitors beat him at weight-lifting, which turned out to be a very short event, concluding as soon as he gave up (on the third weight). The best that could be said for his performance in the axe-throwing was that he didn’t kill anybody. Asburn won the heavy running; Poldarn did manage to complete the course, though only by turning round and dragging the sack backwards for the last fifty yards. By any standards it was a pretty hopeless showing; but the worse he did, the more good-natured, even affectionate grew the laughter and shouted commentary from the two households; for some reason (no doubt entirely logical, if you were in on the basic premises) the more hopeless and pathetic he made himself look, the more they seemed to like him. Actually, he could explain that: you tended to distrust, fear and dislike the stranger, the man you didn’t know, couldn’t properly assess. Once he demonstrated a complete lack of physical prowess, there was much less reason for fear and animosity. Accordingly, Poldarn postponed his feigned injury for a while and carried on.
The next event was wood-chopping; each of the ten competitors was presented with a log and given an axe, and the first to cut all the way through was the winner. Most likely Poldarn wouldn’t even have tried to win, if the log put in front of him hadn’t been quite obviously thicker than anybody else’s. But that struck him as unnecessarily unfair; and when the referee (Colsceg) yelled ‘Go!’, he found that he was taking out his negative feelings on the log. Furthermore, after the first few cuts he realised that he was good at this; instead of trying to hit, he was putting all his effort into the swing, bringing the axe up as high as he could get it and then letting it drop, guiding it into the slot with a light but firm hand, making sure he cut at the most effective angle in the most effective place, never taking his eye off the mark – it felt right, the way forge-welding the axe head for Boarci had, and the upshot of it was that he won by a clear margin, much to the surprise and disgust of the other eight competitors. Everyone else cheered, in a slightly stunned way, and Poldarn found himself revelling in the pleasures of victory to an extent he wouldn’t have thought possible. In fact, he realised, he couldn’t have done better if he’d planned it out carefully beforehand. Losing the first five events had got rid of the mystery and the menace; winning the sixth against all the apparent odds was exactly the right thing to do. They still liked him, but now he wasn’t
quite the abject failure any more, there was at least one thing he was pretty good at. All in all, he decided that he approved of this wedding-games tradition. It definitely had its uses.
Poldarn lost the light running, of course; but he did come fourth out of a field of ten, which was also just right, from a tactical point of view. Next came the wrestling, and after the first two competitors had kicked his knees out from under him and dumped him unceremoniously on his back with gratuitous force, he might have lost his temper just a little; his next opponent, Seyward the middle-house hand, found himself flying through the air (Where did I learn to do that? Who gives a damn?), Barn got an elbow in his solar plexus and sat down with a pretty hilarious grunt of astonishment, and Eyvind didn’t stand a chance. In the event, Poldarn came third out of seven, as well as getting a welcome chance to sublimate his growing frustrations with his life in general into quite natural and healthy acts of extreme violence.
While he was recovering from his exertions and flexing a painful left shoulder (though his ankle was hardly bothering him at all now, for some reason) the Colscegford party were setting up the trestles, planks and bed of rocks Boarci had threatened him with. That spoiled his otherwise fairly positive mood. Boarci had said, entirely plausibly, that staff-fighting was an art, and a difficult one at that. He’d seen a few staff-fights in the Bohec valley, and what he could remember of the moves seemed to bear that judgement out. Furthermore, the trestles were unnecessarily high, in his opinion, and the rocks looked positively dangerous. To make matters worse, Boarci was parading up and down on the other side of the ring performing a very impressive repertoire of twirls and juggles with a seven-foot ash pole, and his grin was plainly visible from twenty yards away.
Poldarn slumped against a ring-stake and made a cursory inventory of his aches and pains. As well as the shoulder injury and the dodgy ankle, he had a sinister twinge in his left forearm, a pulled muscle in his chest, another in the small of his back and a distinct ache in his left hamstring. On the other hand, his headache had cleared up altogether, which was nice. So, he told himself, cheer up. Be positive. Look on the bright side. Count your blessings.
As it turned out, he didn’t have to face Boarci straight away – some other poor fool got up at the opposite end of the plank. Poldarn was so preoccupied with trying to figure out how to beat the shit out of the man who’d repeatedly saved his life that he didn’t really take much notice of this first bout until it was over, and his opponent was crawling out from under the plank on his hands and knees.
Oh, Poldarn thought, I seem to have won. How did I do that? He thought about it, and remembered his moves, reviewing them as if he’d been watching someone else: the enemy’s feint sparred up to the left, a pre-emptive parry with the butt of the pole joined with an aggressive step forward to force the opponent onto his back foot, followed by a jump back to make room and a deft flick of the wrist to jab the pole into the other man’s teeth, swiftly doubled into a meaty jab to the right ankle and a finishing smack to the left ear. Did I do all that? he wondered. Apparently I did. He tried to remember who he’d been fighting, but he couldn’t. He’d seen a target, not a face, and all targets look the same, after a while.
The next man to clamber up onto the plank wasn’t Boarci, either; he lasted about five heartbeats before toppling off with a suspected broken collarbone. Next up was brother-inlaw Barn, who presented a whole new set of problems. Barn was slow and physically inept, but so massive that hitting him didn’t seem to achieve anything; and when he did swing his staff, parrying it was out of the question, given the necessity of staying on the plank. But either luck or repressed memory gave him the answer. A deft little prod to the back of the knee turned Barn’s greatest asset into a liability, and he landed with a thump that shook the earth almost as much as the erupting volcano had. After him came Asburn, looking distinctly nervous. He seemed far more interested in defending himself than in attacking, whereas Poldarn had no wish whatsoever to hurt someone who was almost a friend. The upshot was a bout in which both parties pranced and feinted a lot, retreating to the far ends of the plank whenever their staffs happened to clack together. Whether Asburn really did fall over his feet, or whether he disguised a deliberate jump off the plank with a little cursory dumbshow, Poldarn wasn’t sure; but he reckoned it was significant that Asburn landed cleanly on his feet well away from the carpet of rocks, and he made a resolution to thank him later, when nobody was looking.
Finally, Boarci stepped up, still fiendishly twirling his staff and pulling horrific faces. No doubt about it, he meant business, as his first onslaught amply proved – a lightning-fast lunge pulled at the last moment, followed up with a remarkably elegant quick-step shuffle up the plank, and converted into a hand-over-hand diagonal slash with the butt of the pole. By this stage, Poldarn had run out of plank to retreat onto; all he could do was duck, knowing as he did it that he was leaving his legs open to an extremely painful strike, which duly followed. Somehow, though, he kept his footing – not only that, but he improvised a side-swung riposte, fairly weak but sufficiently wristy to glance off the ball of Boarci’s shoulder and clip his ear hard enough to draw blood. Gratifyingly, Boarci jumped backwards out of the way, snapping into a perfect guard that was complete as soon as he landed. This gave Poldarn just enough time to catch his breath; then the next attack came in, and he realised that the first sally had been just a warm-up. He didn’t have time to study or analyse the moves, it was all he could do to get his staff in the way of most of them, while the ones he didn’t block landed on his knees and elbows, cramping him with pain. It was obvious that Boarci was taking his time, looking to wear Poldarn down with a series of carefully planned debilitating strikes that would inhibit his movements and lay him open for an artfully devised finishing strategy; the only way to counter it that he could see was one big, unexpected move to finish the fight in a heartbeat – and that was all very well, but he had no idea how to go about it. So he hung on, defending and trying to sneak back as much as he could of the ground he was continually forced to give, several times walking into punishing strikes simply in order to stay up the plank.
Then he saw his chance. Boarci swung a feint at Poldarn’s face, intending to draw up his guard so as to open him for a crack across the left knee. Instead of parrying, however, Poldarn deliberately held still and took the blow – it was torture fighting down his instincts, waiting for what seemed like an eternity for the pole to smack into his cheekbone. Then, as the blow landed, he stepped forward into it and pushed rather than lunged, catching Boarci just below the navel. It was a weak contact, inflicting no pain, scoring no points; but Boarci was already on the move, stepping into a parry that hadn’t happened but too late to adjust his strategy – he was thinking four moves ahead, and didn’t have time to revise his plans on the fly. Just at that moment, his balance was a smidgeon too far forward, and Poldarn eased him off the plank with a gentle prod. Boarci disappeared, and a furious yell of pain suggested that he’d made an awkward landing on something hard, sharp or both. Poldarn smiled.
Nobody else seemed inclined to play, so Poldarn walked slowly to the end of the plank and jumped, like a little bird hopping off a twig. As he touched ground, his ankle gave way and he staggered, lost his feet and dropped down hard on his knees, just on the edge of the carpet of rocks. Something jagged bit into his left kneecap and he howled. For some reason the spectators seemed to find that unbearably amusing, as if he’d deliberately done something witty and clever.
He managed to get up again by planting the pole firmly in the ground and pulling himself up hand over hand, but that was about as far as he felt competent to go; so he clung to the top of the pole and remained there, swaying slightly, until Asburn and Eyvind trotted up and helped him over to a tree stump, where he could sit down and concentrate on feeling really sorry for himself without the distraction of having to maintain his balance.
‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ Eyvind whispered noisily in his ea
r. ‘Are you out of your mind, or do you just enjoy hurting people?’
Poldarn looked up sharply. ‘What?’
Eyvind stared at him; incomprehension staring at incomprehension, an optical effect like the well-known juxtaposition of two facing mirrors. Then he sighed. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I guess it’s probably my fault, somebody’s fault, anyhow. You weren’t to know – you can’t see things unless people tell you out loud. The point is, it’s not meant to be serious. It’s a game. The idea is, you let everybody beat you at sports, to show what a good sort you are, and in return they go easy on you in the fighting events; nobody gets beaten up, and we all have a nice drink afterwards. You’re treating it like it’s a battle to the death.’
‘But that’s not fair,’ Poldarn objected, trying to keep his cool but failing. ‘They weren’t going easy on me, far from it. And I’ve got the bruises to prove it.’
‘Yes, they were.’
And, now that Poldarn thought about it, yes, they had been, until he’d lost his rag and made a fight of it in the wrestling. His first few opponents in that event had bruised his pride but not his bones; they’d taken extreme care to throw him gently, which he’d taken for a patronising display of superior skill rather than a logical reluctance to incapacitate a member of the workforce. It was only when he’d taken to throwing them in return – not to mention kicking and elbow-slamming and various other over-effective techniques – that they’d hurt him at all, and that was purely self-defence on their part, though as it turned out his skill had been superior to theirs and their moves hadn’t worked terribly well. By the time they’d got to the quarterstaff, they’d got wise to the change in rules and objectives, but all the same they’d only fought seriously because he’d started it and they didn’t want to get hurt. Once again, it had so happened that he was better at bashing with a long pole than they were; and now here he was feeling all smug because he’d contrived to turn a cheerful burlesque into a ferocious battle. Magnificent, he thought, and me all over. But none of this would’ve happened if only they’d filled me in on the plot beforehand . . .
