by Jared Shurin
And, just like that, the tournament was over.
Her open-mouthed opposition sidled away into the crowds, sheathing their swords or just letting them fall, never to dare pick one up again for fear of facing an opponent such as she. It didn’t take much imagination to feel those one thousand cuts and the slow death caused by that keen edge.
A Courtier escorted Ellie into the Castle. In a private chamber, he told her the true nature of her uncontested victory: she was to fight the heir to the throne.
“It is tradition,” the Courtier explained. “The Prince proves himself worthy by besting the greatest swordsman--or woman--in the land.”
“And if he loses?” Ellie asked, wide-eyed.
“Then he is not worthy.”
Ellie frowned, toyed with the frayed rope belt that cinched her faded dress. “It’s not a fair contest, is it?”
The Courtier smiled thinly. This was breaking his heart. He had a daughter Ellie’s age. He was thankful this would be his last Royal duty.
“No, child; it is not.”
Ellie nodded, thoughtful. “Then I wish to fight the Prince with my own sword.”
“But it is blunt!” the Courtier exclaimed.
“I may leave my mark upon the future King, but I will not dishonour my father or my village by drawing Royal blood.”
The Courtier stifled a sob, blinked away tears. Screwed his courage to perform one last betrayal. “We will respect your wishes, bravest of girls. But, in order to satisfy the... um, protocols, we must prepare your sword for its place in the Arena’s weapon rack.”
The Prince stood before Ellie and bowed deeply. Uncertain of the ‘protocols’, she bowed back. The audience of nobles and visiting dignitaries arrayed in the steep fencing arena tittered in astonishment, drawing a blush from both young contestants.
The Prince raised his jewelled rapier in salute and adopted the first form.
Ellie blinked. He performed the manoeuvre well enough. But surely this was child’s play? Was she merely to trade forms with this handsome young Prince, rather than crossing blades?
She mimicked the move, right down to the slight hesitation in his final flourish.
The audience murmured its approval. Here were two equally matched opponents. They had suspected a fraud. A girl, that young? Even though the Prince was a mere lad, the supposed contest insulted the intelligence of the assembled spectators. But the swordplay put paid to such fears. How many of the forms would these two complete, they wondered? And who would emerge victorious?
The Prince perhaps had entertained similar doubts--it was difficult to believe that this slip of a girl had scared away the best swordsmen in his army. And the rumour that she had performed the legendary dance of a thousand cuts--ridiculous!
He too had feared he faced an innocent plucked from the crowd. Perhaps as an attempt to discredit him. After all, besting a girl not yet grown into a woman; where was the honour in that?
More confident, he performed the second form, his steel drawing smoothly through the unresisting air, remembering his lessons from those exotic foreigners his father employed for the purpose. Remembering their admonishments not to overextend his elbows; to let the weight of the sword do the work.
Exhilarated, he took a pace back, to watch Ellie attempt to follow his lead.
She smiled up at him. Cocked her head and danced through the form.
Connoisseurs in the galleried stands gasped and rose to their feet in admiration.
On they performed. As the stations increased in difficulty, the Prince’s supple body gleamed with perspiration. But while each successfully completed form brought him yet more to life, Ellie felt oddly leaden. Not only did it seem that her trusty sword no longer responded when she fumbled a move, but she felt it was actively sucking the feeling from the fingers of her right hand.
For the seventh move, she switched the blade to her left, and the audience gasped as the thrilling perfection returned once again.
The Prince shook the sweat from his brow. He had thought he had reached and surmounted Ellie’s abilities. Had she been toying with him? Was she left-handed all along? The way she performed the difficult eighth move--now it was he who was out of his depth.
On the ninth form, muscles straining, he made his first mistake. A thrust where a parry was required. An error that left him overextended, vulnerable. He could almost hear the accented curse of his fencing tutor.
Embarrassed, he hardly dared watch as Ellie took flight, her young face strained with concentration. He assumed it was because of the difficulty of the level and not because she could no longer feel the grip of her sword with either hand.
As in a perfect mirror, though, her left to his right, she copied his mistake. The Prince narrowed his eyes. Was this a compliment, or an insult?
The audience bubbled with excitement. This was swordplay of the highest order. Few attained such ranks as these and none so young.
Halfway through the eleventh form, Ellie’s sight dimmed, the images separating, her eyes seemingly losing their ability to work together. The doubled vision almost made her falter and only muscle memory allowed her to complete the complicated sequence.
Blinking, she watched the Prince hesitate. He thought--for the first time--that he might have edged the manoeuvre; that her positioning and execution was not as accomplished as his, that not only did she not, on this occasion, copy his faults, but had made some of her own. She had obviously reached her limits.
The problem was, so had he. He had never completed the twelfth form successfully. It was an order of magnitude more difficult than its predecessors. Though he had been coaxed through its individual steps, the whole had always defeated him.
Still. He had long since exceeded his own expectations, as had this waif of a girl before him. Gone were his worries that the contest was fixed, that his opponent was deliberately inexperienced, or had in some way been weakened. The comments and glances of his courtiers had made him fear so. It was shameful and his protestations that this must be a fair fight had only encouraged insincere avowals that it was fair.
And indeed, the fight had been fought on merit. More: if he was to win, he needed to complete--for the first time--the twelfth form; an achievement that would automatically qualify him as a sword master. Nail that and there was no way Ellie could follow.
The young Prince summoned his nerve, calling upon his long line of Royal ancestors to help.
Ellie stood, panting, squinting. It was hard to tell through her blurred vision, but it seemed the Prince had completed the final form. All she had to do was match him and then the contest could begin in earnest.
She had wondered how the duel was to be fixed. Had assumed the judges would not be impartial, would favour the Prince. But they’d been more subtle than that, hadn’t they?
Her limbs were leaden and she could not see.
She could have laughed, had she the energy. She’d been prepared to cross her blunt sword with the Prince’s sharp one. Prepared, if need be, to let him strike home a blow, to receive a cut that her blade could not inflict.
The poison had not been necessary. Yes, poison: it was obvious. Poison that sapped her strength and her skill. That would surely kill her, if the Prince’s sword did not; once they were through with the trivialities of the twelve forms.
Somehow she knew there was no cure, no antidote. Such a terrible, pointless waste! Anger battled with her tiredness, lost out to the sapping toxin in her veins.
So be it. In her final actions she would at least bestow honour on her village, on her father, on her brother.
She closed her eyes. Felt the hushed silence of the Royal arena. And danced.
Despite the numb feeling, the tunnel vision, the lump in her throat that made swallowing difficult and had begun to hamper her breathing. Despite her young heart pounding like it had never pounded before. Despite all of this, Ellie’s dance was faultless.
It was, after all, a form she had danced hundreds of times.
&nbs
p; The watching crowd erupted into rapturous applause. No contest fought in this hallowed arena had ever reached this point before.
If it had been independently judged, Ellie would have won. The twelfth form alone would have guaranteed it. But no such independent judge could be found, not on the Prince’s Coronation day, not for an opponent who had no right to still be standing, let alone flashing her sword.
With solemn reverence, the announcement was made: a draw. The winner would be decided by the drawing of first blood.
Even before the Prince had a chance to process this, while he stood, staring slack-jawed up at the Courtier who had made the announcement, Ellie summoned up the last of her nerve and stumbled forward onto his outstretched sword. She felt its cold tip pierce her stuttering heart and gasped her final breath.
The Prince was crowned an hour later, tears still wet on his cheeks. The following day he issued his first Royal Decree. The Courtier and the Royal Physician were arrested on charges of treason.
The Physician died by his own hand; swallowing poison from a hollowed out pearl button on his jerkin, the same poison that had been smeared on the hilt of Ellie’s magical training sword.
As for the loyal Courtier he was hung, drawn and quartered. Who knows? Perhaps he would have suffered the legendary dance of the thousand cuts, were there anyone alive who could perform it.
A Son of the Sea
Priya Sharma
Cadogan stood at the end of the bed.
“Feeling better? Good. Now, ground rules. Scream and I’ll stuff rags in your mouth and break your legs. And you eat and drink or I’ll make you.” He pulled a funnel and a hose from a bag to demonstrate.
After we talked I lay on my side trying to get comfortable, and eventually fell asleep. I dreamt of the sea.
I stood on the shore, the rim of the aquatic world. Its shallows were pale and translucent. I wanted to be further out, in its dark depths. The surf rushed up to me, covered my feet and ankles in welcome, then rushed off again. I waded in until I was waist deep. A wave broke against the underwater slope, sending up spray that looked like a fan of molten glass.
In my dream, as in life, just looking in the water, just knowing I was going in was enough. My body readied itself. It relaxed. I took three deep breaths, working the muscles in my stomach and chest. Then I started packing, the act of gulping air, forcing it into my lungs.
The housemaster at one of my boarding schools once said to me, “Leave before you’re expelled, you lanky streak of piss.”
He wasn’t to know the ways in which I’m made for water.
All the wonders that have blessed my eyes, they were there in my dream, when I needed them most.
I’ve always sought the ocean. Rivers are insufficient. I need water in the thrall of the moon. I need tides not just currents.
I’d spent six months working as a barman in Greece when Cadogan found me.
“Mick’s Shack” was a concrete box with plastic tables and chairs but I liked it because it was on the beach. I had a sea view as I poured drinks.
We were getting ready to open for the evening. In an hour we’d be heaving with island hoppers, pumped up on pheromones and their own immortality. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t that much older than them but I’d never had a night of drinking, pill popping, and fucking, followed by a day lying on the beach cooking a melanoma.
I was bringing up crates of beer from the cellar. I could see Suzie’s flip flops as I came up the steps, her feet skimmed by her thin, long skirt. She was talking to someone. One look told me he wasn’t looking for work. He was in his fifties and his hands were spread on the bar in a proprietorial manner that made me dislike him straight away.
“Thomas Briggs.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Who’s asking?” I felt as if he was about to arrest me.
“I’m Paul Cadogan. I need to talk to you.”
“Do I need to talk to you?”
“It’s important.”
“Still not interested.” I picked up a cloth and wiped down the bar, making him move his hands.
“In that case, I’ll have a beer.”
Suzie went to the fridge but I pulled a warm bottle from the crate I’d just brought up and levered it against the bottle opener on the bar. The cap dropped into the bin beneath with a tinkling sound.
“Ten euros.”
His laugh was sour. He shook his head as he pulled out his wallet. “It’s all on expenses anyway.”
Knowing what I do now I would’ve made that beer ice cold and gratis but I was thorny because I suspected he had something to do with my father.
“You were difficult to locate. Why don’t you get a bloody mobile and a Facebook page like the rest of the world?”
“Because nobody gives a fuck where I am.”
“Poor little lost boy.”
“I’m not lost.”
“If you say so. You’re certainly not poor any more.” Cadogan took a long deliberate pull from the bottle. “That got your attention, didn’t it? Why don’t we go outside?”
I followed him out to the chairs and tables under the canopy, not because of the prospect of a fortune but because I thought I might as well get it over with.
“Your father’s solicitor has been anxious to find you. Your father’s dead.”
“How?”
“Diving in Mauritius. He had a heart attack. It happened two months ago. We couldn’t find you in time for the funeral.”
I looked towards the sparkling, dark blue waves. The Mediterranean is relatively placid, being a landlocked sea. It calmed me. “How did you find me now?”
“You cashed one of your father’s cheques.”
“Oh, right.”
“You’re wealthy.” He couldn’t keep all his bitterness from his voice, not entirely. All he saw was a twenty-five-year-old who’d piss a fortune he hadn’t made up the wall.
He slid something across the table at me.
“What’s this?” I picked up the business card.
“It’s how you cash in. She’s your father’s solicitor.”
“Where was Dad buried?”
“In Sussex.”
“Did many people go?”
“A lot.”
“Did you know him?” I tried to sound casual.
“Never met him but I did a lot of research about you two when I was trying to find you. Did you know that he kept the apartment in Hong Kong where you both lived? Perhaps you should go. You might find out more about him.”
I made a non-committal sound. Cadogan had done his homework. He knew Dad and I barely spoke.
“It’s on Ma Wan, the island where your mother was from.”
I stared at the card, turning it over in my fingers, angry that I’d learnt more about my mother from an ape like Cadogan than my father had ever told me.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
Suzie threw her bag down on the sand and sat beside me. The bar had closed and the punters had taken the party out onto the beach. They gathered in the firelight. I sat apart, where I could hear the waves.
“How do you know?”
“I can just tell. Are you in trouble?”
“My father died.”
“I’m so sorry.” Suzie meant it.
“It’s okay. I didn’t know him.”
She didn’t press me. I liked that about her. She knew when to leave things alone. She clutched at the rough grass that pushed up through the sand in clumps, pulling the coarse blades through her fingers.
“I’m sorry you’re going. This is going to sound selfish but you’re the only person here that I’m comfortable with. Everyone else thinks I’m bossy and stuck up.”
By everyone, she meant the other staff.
“I reckon we’re a lot alike.”
“Are we?” I tried not to frown. I didn’t want to hurt her.
“I was carted about as a kid,” she said. “Army brat. Never settling makes you seem more self-reliant than you are. What�
��s your story?”
“Boarding schools. Lots of them.” I didn’t elaborate.
“I knew it. I could tell. You’re different to all the others.”
I was different but not in the way she thought. “We’re all misfits, Suzie. We can’t outrun ourselves.”
“No, I suppose not.” She sounded disappointed at that. “You don’t care what people think of you, do you?”
I shrugged. I had no idea if I cared whether people liked me or not any more.
Loneliness was a constant friend. I nurtured it.
Suzie poured sand from palm to palm. “I envy you. You’re comfortable in your own skin.”
There was always one in the group, wherever I went. I was a blank canvas on which they projected their own desires and hopes. Suzie dusted the sand off her hands and reached for my beer bottle. She drained it.
Her face told me everything she wanted from me. I envied her ability to make herself that plain. She pulled her t-shirt over her head, revealing her bikini top. Her skirt sat low on her hips and she leant back, forming a long curve from her ribcage to her waistband.
I reached out and touched the tattoo on her side, tracing it with my forefinger. It was perfectly formed from its coronet to its curled tail. Suzie had spent proper money on it. The fins were picked out in fine lines and the shape of the armour beneath the skin gave it substance. Its colours were delicate yellows. Seahorses give me heartache. Little fishes of surreal grace. Ground up for medicine as a panacea for asthma, skin issues, heart disease, and erectile dysfunction. Taken from the wild and sold as pets only to die within a few weeks without expert care. Weight for weight, they command the same price as gold in some quarters.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s beautiful.”
