The Book of Swords Read online

  His eyes were cold and bright. “The man who killed my father is still alive,” he said. “He’s settled and prosperous, happy, he’s got everything he could possibly want. He came through the nightmare of Ultramar, and now the world makes sense to him again, and he’s a useful and productive member of society, admired and respected by his peers and his betters.”

  “So you’re going to cut his throat.”

  He shook his head. “Not likely,” he said. “That would be murder. No, I’m going to fight him sword to sword. I’m going to beat him and prove myself the better man. Then I’ll kill him.”

  I was tactfully silent for a moment. Then I said; “And you know absolutely nothing about sword-fighting.”

  “No. My father should’ve taught me, it’s what fathers do. But he died when I was two years old. I don’t know the first thing about it.”

  “And you’re going to challenge an old soldier, and you’re going to prove yourself the better man. I see.”

  He was looking me straight in the eye. I always feel uncomfortable when people do that even though I spend my life gazing at white-hot metal. “I asked about you,” he said. “They reckon you were a great fencer.”

  I sighed. “Who told you that?”

  “Were you?”

  “Were implies a state of affairs that no longer prevails,” I said. “Who told you about me?”

  He shrugged. “Friends of my father. You were a legend in Ultramar, apparently. Everybody’d heard of you.”

  “The defining characteristic of a legend is that it isn’t true,” I said. “I can fight, a bit. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You’re going to teach me.”

  I remember one time in Ultramar, we were smashing up this village. We did a lot of that. They called it chevauchee, but that’s just chivalry talk for burning barns and stamping on chickens. It’s supposed to break the enemy’s will to fight. Curiously enough, it has exactly the opposite effect. Anyway, I was in this farmyard. I had a torch in my hand, and I was going to set fire to a hayrick, like you do. And there was this dog. It was a stupid little thing, the sort you keep to catch rats, little more than a rat itself; and it jumped out at me, barking its head off, and it sank its teeth into my leg, and it simply would not let go, and I couldn’t get at it to stab it with my knife, not without stabbing myself in the process. I dropped the torch and danced round the farmyard, trying to squash it against walls, but it didn’t seem to make any odds. It was the most ridiculous little thing, and in the end it beat me. I staggered out into the lane, and it let go, dropped off, and sprinted back into the yard. My sergeant had to light the rick with a fire-arrow, and I never lived it down.

  I looked at him. I recognised the look in his silly pink face. “Is that right,” I said.

  “Yes. I need the best sword and the best teacher. I’ll pay you. You can have the fifth coin.”

  A gold besant. Actually, the proper name is hyperpyron, meaning “extra fine.” The enemy took so many of them off us in Ultramar that they adopted them in place of their own currency. That’s war for you; the enemy turn into you, and you turn into them, like the iron and steel rods under the hammer. The only besants you see over here are ones that got brought back, but they’re current everywhere. “I’m not interested in money,” I said.

  “I know. Neither am I. But if you pay a man to do a job and he takes your money, he’s obliged.”

  “I’m a lousy teacher,” I told him.

  “That’s all right, I’m a hopeless student. We’ll get on like a barn on fire.”

  If ever I get a dog, it’ll be one of those rat-like terriers. Maybe I just warm to aggressive creatures, I don’t know. “You can take your coin and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine,” I told him. “You overpaid me for the sword. We’ll call it change.”

  —

  The sword isn’t a very good weapon. Most forms of armour are proof against it, including a properly padded jerkin, it’s too long to be handy in a scrum and too light and flimsy for serious bashing. In a pitched battle, give me a spear or an axe any time; in fact, nine times out of ten you’d be better off with everyday farm tools—staff-hooks, beanhooks, muck-forks, provided they’re made of good material and properly tempered. Better still, give me a bow and someone in armour to hide behind. The fighting man’s best view of a battlefield is down an arrow, from under a pikeman’s armpit. For self-defence on the road, I favour the quarterstaff; in the street or indoors, where space to move is at a premium, the knife you cut your bread and peel your apples with is as good as anything. You’re used to it, for one thing, and you know where it is on your belt without having to look.

  About the only thing a sword is really good for is sword-fighting—which in practice means duelling, which is idiotic and against the law, or fencing, which is playing at fighting, good fun and nobody gets hurt, but not really my idea of entertainment—and showing off. Which is why, needless to say, we all went to Ultramar with swords on our hips. Some of us had beautiful new swords, the more fortunate ones had really old swords, family heirlooms, worth a thousand acres of good farmland, with buildings, stock, and tenants. The thing is—don’t say I told you so—the old ones aren’t necessarily the best. There was even less good steel about two hundred years ago than there is now, and men were stronger then, so old swords are heavier, harder to use, broader, and with rounded points for cutting, not thrusting. Not that it mattered. Most of those young swashbucklers died of the poisoned shits, before the desert sun had had a chance to fade the clothes they arrived in, and their swords were sold to pay their mess bills. You could pick up some real bargains back then, in Ultramar.

  —

  “I don’t know how to teach,” I said, “I’ve never ever done it. So I’m going to teach you the way my father taught me, because it’s the only way I know. Is that all right?”

  He didn’t notice me picking up the rake. “Fine,” he said. So I pulled the head off the rake—it was always loose—and hit him with the handle.

  I remember my first lesson so well. The main difference was, my father used a broom. First, he poked me in the stomach, hard, with one end. As I doubled up, gasping for breath, he hit my knee-cap, so I fell over. Then he put the end of the broom-handle on my throat and applied controlled pressure.

  I could only just breathe. “You didn’t get out of the way,” he explained.

  I was five when I had my first lesson, and easier to teach to the ground than a full-grown man. I had to tread on the inside of his knee to get him to drop. When eventually he got his breath back, I saw he was crying; actually in tears. “You didn’t get out of the way,” I explained.

  He looked up at me and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “I see,” he said.

  “You won’t make that mistake again,” I told him. “From now on, whenever a fellow human being is close enough to hit you, you’re going to assume that he’s going to hit you. You’ll keep your distance, or you’ll be ready to avoid at a split-second’s notice. Got that?”

  “I think so.”

  “No exceptions,” I said. “Not any, ever. Your brother, your best friend, your wife, your six-year-old daughter, it makes no odds. Otherwise you’ll never be a fighter.”

  He stared at me for a moment, and I guessed he’d understood. It was like that moment in the old play, where the Devil offers the scholar the contract, and the scholar signs it.

  “Get up.”

  I hit him again when he was halfway to his feet. It was just a light tap on the collarbone; just enough to hurt like hell without breaking anything.

  “This is all for my own good, I take it.”

  “Oh yes. This is the most important lesson you’ll ever learn.”

  We spent the next four hours on footwork; the traces, which is backwards and forwards, and the traverses, which is side to side. Each time I hit him, I laid it on a bit harder. He got there eventually.

  —

  My father wasn’t a bad man. He loved his family dearly,
with all his heart; nothing meant more to him. But he had a slight, let’s say, kink in his nature—like the cold spot or the inclusion you sometimes get in a weld, where the metal wasn’t quite hot enough, or a bit of grit or crap gets beaten into the joint. He liked hurting people; it gave him a thrill. Only people, not animals. He was a fine stockman and a humane and conscientious hunter, but he dearly loved to hit people and make them squeal.

  I can understand that, partly because I’m the same though to a lesser degree, and I control it better. Maybe it’s always been there in the blood, or maybe it was a souvenir from Ultramar; both, probably. I rationalise it in forge-welding terms. You can heat the metal white-hot, but you can’t just lay one bit on top of the other and expect them to weld. You’ve got to hit them to make the join. Carefully, judiciously, not too hard and not too soft. Just enough to make the metal cry, and weep sparks. I hate it when they burst into tears, though. It makes me despise them, and I have to take pains to control my temper. Anyway, you can see why I like to stay out of people’s way. I know what’s wrong with me; and knowing your own flaws is the beginning of wisdom. I’m sort of a reverse fencer. I stay well out of distance, partly so that people can’t hit me, mostly so I can’t hit them.

  —

  Once you’ve learned footwork, the rest is relatively easy. I taught him the eight cuts and the seven wards (I stick to seven; the other four are just elaborations). He picked them up quickly, now that he understood the essence—don’t let him hurt you, followed by make him safe.

  “The best way to make a man safe,” I told him, “is to hurt him. Pain will stop him in his tracks. Killing doesn’t always do it. You can stab a man and he’ll be past all hope, but he can still hurt you very badly before he drops to the ground. But if you paralyse him with pain, he’s no longer a threat. You can then despatch him, or let him go, at your pleasure.”

  I demonstrated; I flicked past his guard and prodded him in the stomach with my rake-handle; a lethal thrust, but he was still on his feet. Then I cracked him on the knee, and he dropped. “Killing’s irrelevant,” I told him. “Pain wins fights. That’s unless you’ve absolutely set your heart on cleaving him to the navel, and that’s just melodrama, which will get you killed. In a battle, hurt him and move on to the next threat. In a duel, win and be merciful. Fewer legal problems that way.”

  I was rather enjoying being a teacher, as you’ve probably gathered. I was passing on valuable knowledge and skill, which is in itself rewarding, I was showing off and I was hitting an annoying sprig of the nobility for his own good. What’s not to like?

  You learn best when you’re exhausted, desperate, and in pain. Ultramar taught me that. I kept him at it from dawn till dusk, and then we lit the lamp and did theory. I taught him the line and the circle. Instinctively you want to fight up and down a line, forwards to attack, backwards to defend; parry, then lunge, then parry. All wrong. Idiotic. Instead, you should fight in a circle, stepping sideways, so you avoid him and can hit him at the same time. Never just defend; always counterattack. Every handstroke you make should be a killing stroke, or a stopping stroke. And for every movement of the hand, a movement of the foot—there, I’ve just taught you the whole secret and mystery of swordsmanship, and I never had to hit you once.

  “Most fights,” I told him, giving him a chance to wipe the blood out of his eyes before we moved on, “in which at least one party is competent, last one to four seconds. Anything more than that is a fitting subject for epic poetry.” Judging that he wasn’t ready yet, I shot a quick mandiritto at the side of his head. He stepped back and left out of the way without thinking, and my heart rejoiced inside me, as I side-stepped his riposte in straight time and closed the door with the Third ward. So far he hadn’t hit me once, which was a little disappointing; but he’d come close four times, in six hours. Very promising indeed. He just lacked the killer instinct.

  “The Fifth ward,” I went on, and he lunged. I almost didn’t read it, because he’d disguised the Boar’s Tooth as the Iron Gate; all I could do was trace back very fast and smack the stick out of his hands. Then I whacked him, for interrupting me when I was talking. He very nearly got out of the way, but I wanted to hit him, so he couldn’t.

  He had to pick himself up off the ground after that. I took a long step back, to signal a truce. “I think it’s time for a progress report,” I said. “At the moment, you’re very good indeed. Not the best in the world, but more than capable of beating ninety-nine men in a hundred. Would you like to stop there and save yourself further pain and humiliation?”

  He got up slowly and dabbed at his cut eye. “I want to be the best,” he said. “If that’s all right.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t think you ever can be,” I told him. “In order to be the best, you have to lose so much. It’s just not worth it. Being the best will make you into a monster. Stick with just plain good, you’ll be so much happier.”

  He was a pitiful sight, all cuts and bruises. But still, under all the blood and discoloured tissue, a hopeful, pretty boy. “I think I’d like to carry on just a bit longer if you don’t mind.”

  “Please yourself,” I said, and let him pick up his stick.

  —

  Actually, he reminded me a lot of myself at his age.

  I was a brash, irritating boy when I went to Ultramar. I’d known all along that I wasn’t going to get the land, having elder brothers in good health. Probably I’d always resented that. I think I’d have made a good farmer. I was always the one who wasn’t afraid of hard work, who saw the need to get things done—not tomorrow, or when we’ve got five minutes, or when it stops raining, but now, right now; before the roof-tree breaks and the barn falls down, before the fence-posts snap off and the sheep get out into the marsh, before the oats spoil on the stalk, before the meat goes off in the heat; now while there’s still time, before it’s too late. Instead, I saw the place gradually falling to pieces—and decline and decay are so peacefully gradual; grass takes so long to grow up through the cobbles, it’s imperceptible, therefore not threatening. But my father and my brothers didn’t share my view. I was keen to get away from them. I wanted to take a sword and slice myself a fat chunk of the world off the bone. There’s good land in Ultramar, they told me, all it needs is a bit of hard work and it could be the best in the world.

  The very best; that’s a concept that’s danced ahead of me, just out of reach, all my life. Now, of course, I am the very best, at one small corner of one specific craft. I’m stuck, wedged in by my own pre-eminence, like a rafter lying across your leg in a burning house.

  But never mind; I went to Ultramar aiming to be a farmer. When I got there, I found what was left after seventy years of continual reciprocal chevauchees. I recognised it at once. It was what was going to happen to my father’s land back home, but in macrocosm. All the barns fallen, all the fences broken down, all the crops spoilt, briars and nettles neck-high in all the good pastures; the effects of peace and idleness accelerated and forced (like you force early crops, under straw) by the merely instrumental action of the wars. Cut myself off a slice of that, I said to myself; why the hell would I want to bother? So I started hurting people instead.

  And the thing is, if you do it in war, they praise you for it. Strange, but true.

  In war, there’s so much scope, you can afford to be selective. You can afford to limit yourself to hurting the enemy, of whom there are plenty to go round, and twice as many again once you’ve finished what’s on your plate. I survived in Ultramar because I was having the time of my life, for a while.

  Odd thing about farmers; they love their land and their stock and their buildings, fences, trees, but give them the chance to wreck someone else’s land, kill their stock, burn their buildings, smash their fences, maim their trees, and after a brief show of reluctance they go to it with a will. I think it’s just basic revenge; take that, agriculture, that’ll learn you. Volunteers for a chevauchee? My hand was up before I had time to think.

  And
then I did something bad, and I had to come home. I cried when they pronounced sentence. I despise men who cry. They told me I was to be spared the noose in recognition of my years of valiant and honourable service. I don’t think so. I think they were just being very, very spiteful.

  —

  There came a moment, very sudden and unexpected, when it was over, and I’d succeeded. I went to smack him—a feint high followed by a cut low—and he simply wasn’t there to be hit; and then my ear stung horribly, and while I was confused and distracted by the pain, he dug me in the pit of the stomach with his broom-handle.

  He wasn’t like me. He took a long step back and let me recover. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  It took me quite awhile to get back enough breath to say, “No, don’t apologise, whatever you do.” Then I squared up into First. “Again.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t be so bloody stupid. Again.”

  I let him come at me, because attacking is so much harder. I read him like a book, swung easily into a traverse and the devastating volte, my speciality; and he cracked me on the elbow as I floundered past him, then prodded me in the small of the back, just before I overbalanced and fell over.

  He helped me up. “I think I’m starting to get the hang of this,” he said.

  I went for him. I wanted to beat him, more than I’ve ever wanted anything. I couldn’t get anywhere near him, and he kept hitting me, gently, just to make a point. After a dozen or so passes, I dropped to my knees. All my strength had drained out of me, as though one of his gentle prods had punctured right to my heart. “I give up,” I said. “You win.”

  He was looking down at me with a sort of confused frown. “I don’t follow.”

  “You’ve beaten me,” I said. “You’re now the better man.”

  “Really?”

  “What do you want, a bloody certificate? Yes.”

  He nodded slowly. “Which makes you the best ever teacher,” he said. “Thank you.”

  I threw away the rake-handle. “You’re welcome,” I said. “Now go away. We’re finished with each other.”