‘Will our guest call the start of the bout?’ Lorenzo asked.
‘Fine,’ I said, an idea coming to mind. ‘When I call the start of the match, you may begin, and you will fight until first blood. Any man goes past first blood shows himself unable to control his blade and forfeits the match.’ There: see what you can do with that, you pompous cornstalk.
‘As you say,’ Lorenzo said, bowing towards me.
Cairn nodded.
‘Fine. Begin,’ I said.
Lorenzo’s blade whipped out and I thought it might be over before it began, but he held the blow before it could connect. A feint, and well executed, for certain – and convincing enough that Cairn had flinched and put his arms up in front of his face, looking to all the world like a child trying to avoid a slap.
The crowd laughed.
‘Are you all right?’ Lorenzo enquired solicitously, pulling his blade back and leaning forward with an expression of utter concern.
More laughter.
Cairn came back into guard. Lorenzo attacked again, using almost the exact same move. It’s not an uncommon trick to make it appear as if you’re going to repeat a feint, but this time to follow through with the blow. But in this case, with embarrassment as his aim, Lorenzo simply feinted exactly the same way, and produced exactly the same result. Poor Cairn was humiliated and left off-balance.
The audience was stingingly unsympathetic.
At first I was relieved: this would just be a way for Lorenzo to embarrass Cairn and reassert his dominance of the group. But I was mistaken. Lorenzo was an excellent swordsman, and he had all the control he needed to dominate the fight and not draw blood. But as the fight went on, he used that control not to scare Cairn, but to beat him mercilessly with the flat of his blade. No blood was drawn, but Cairn was being badly struck, over and over. When he tried to fight defensively, Lorenzo would sneak past his guard and hit him with the flat. When he tried scoring a touch, Lorenzo punished him with much harder strikes.
To his credit, Cairn kept getting up, taking his punishment – then Lorenzo knocked the tip of Cairn’s blade down towards the ground and delivered a vicious strike against his wrist with the flat of his blade. I heard a crack.
‘Enough!’ I said. ‘Fighters separate.’
Lorenzo stood back for a moment. ‘First Cantor? I don’t understand – I thought you said we fought to first blood?’
I looked out into the crowd. A few looked horrified at what was happening but more, many, many more, looked gleeful at the show they were getting.
‘The boy’s had enough,’ I said.
‘I—’ Cairn began.
‘He can withdraw if he wishes,’ Lorenzo said soothingly, ‘but any man or woman who runs from a fight is no Greatcoat and has no business here with us.’
I laughed. ‘“Runs from a fight?” You child. We run from fights all the time – we run from any fight we can get away from. “Judge Fair, Ride Fast, Fight Hard” – fighting is always our last resort.’
It was Lorenzo’s turn to sneer. ‘Well, perhaps that explains why you ran so quickly the last time there was a fight worth winning! Perhaps that’s why there’s no King and no Greatcoats any more. Perhaps we –’ and here he turned and swept his arms out wide – ‘perhaps we plan on fighting, not running!’
Aline put a hand on my arm. ‘Let’s go, Falcio. I think we should go now.’
I shrugged her arm off.
‘You’re a fool, Lorenzo, and so is anyone here who listens to this tripe. You think you’re going to take forty men and women and fight an armoured division of Knights? In plate-mail? The army that came for the King had a thousand men on horseback. You think you can fight your way out of that?’ I felt the sting of irony myself, since I had tried very hard to convince the King to let me do that very thing.
‘You know, First Cantor, you look tired. Perhaps you need to rest, and dream sweet dreams of the past, while younger and better men do the fighting for you. Or perhaps –’ he turned and smiled wolfishly – ‘perhaps you’d like to show us all a thing or two about how you used to do it in the old days?’
‘Come on, Falcio,’ Aline said. ‘This isn’t your fight.’
But she was wrong: these people were calling themselves Greatcoats. I had devoted my life to this cause, and a hundred and forty-three others had done the same. We had fought and bled and died for this cause. My King had lost his head for this cause.
Lorenzo was right about one thing, though, I was tired. I was tired of Dukes and Knights, and even the common folk calling us ‘Trattari’ and ‘tatter-cloaks’ and worse. I was tired of the memory of what we had tried to do for the world being sullied. More than anything, I was tired of running and hiding. I knew I should just leave with Aline, try and find somewhere else to hide. I could practically hear Brasti shouting in my ear, telling me not to put my anger in front of my reason again. He was right.
But I’d be thrice-damned before I let these fools, these arrogant sons-of-bitches, put the final death to the memory of the Greatcoats.
I walked towards the centre of the hall, checking the crowd. Sometimes these things can turn against you quickly if you misread the situation. You might think you’re walking into a duel, but if fifteen men decide they want to join in, you can’t just shout ‘that’s not fair’ at them and hope they’ll back off. But these people didn’t care about anything but a good show. They thought Lorenzo was unbeatable, Saint Caveil himself come to teach them the sword. Well, fine. Kest always says that Saints are just little Gods and are probably due for a beating anyway.
When I reached Cairn he looked up in obvious agony. ‘I’m not done yet,’ he said. ‘I can still fight; there’s been no first blood.’
‘He’s right, you know,’ Lorenzo said. ‘Good for you, Cairn. Let’s go again!’
‘Get up and go and find a doctor for your wrist,’ I said.
‘I’m not a coward!’ he half-cried, half-croaked through the pain.
‘Fine,’ I said. I pulled my rapier out and slashed Cairn’s arm. A thin line of bright red appeared and he yelled out.
‘Why?’ he said through gritted teeth.
‘Your honour’s satisfied. You didn’t withdraw. Now go to the fucking doctor and get your broken wrist seen to or you’ll never be able to use a sword anyway.’
There was a smattering of giggles around the room.
‘Shall we begin, oh mighty teacher?’ Lorenzo asked.
I waited until Cairn had pulled himself up and made his way out the door before I said, ‘I’m going to beat you silly, you stupid, pompous waste of a boy.’
I’m not sure what it was about that particular phrase that got to him, but something did. Lorenzo came at me with that long rapier of his with seven bloody hells shining out his eyes.
I’d like to be able to tell you that I pulled some very simple but ingenious move and knocked him flat on his back in one blow. I’d like to say that everyone laughed and he was humiliated and skulked off to begin a career as village idiot somewhere. But unfortunately that’s not how it happened.
To begin with, Lorenzo really was an outstanding fighter. He was probably as good with a sword as anyone I’ve met except for Kest. And he was younger than me by more than a decade. He was taller, with a longer reach, and stronger, with a steadier hand. I was tired and injured and had no business trying to teach him a lesson. If this had been a contest of strength or skill he would have won hands down.
But beat him I did. I beat him black and blue and red.
When he tried to engage my blade, I pulled mine out of line and grabbed the end of his sword with my gloved hand, twisting hard to bend the blade into a small arc and making it difficult for him to pull it away. When he yanked on the sword in frustration I came with it and smashed my hilt into his shoulder. When he tried using his greater height and strength to strike a heavy blow from above I performed a dancer’s lunge to his right and slapped the side of my blade hard against his knee. When he came at me with finesse, I struck back like a drunken brute. When he attacked in rage I countered with finesse. I used every trick I knew to make an opponent angry and careless, to embarrass a man into making mistakes, to humiliate and to hurt. I didn’t want to just beat him. I wanted to break him.
I snapped two of his ribs and the fingers of his right hand. I took the smirk off his face and very nearly went for his entire mouth in the bargain. I beat him because, in the end, I was meaner and more desperate, and because this wasn’t a game to me. I said that Lorenzo was outstanding with the blade, and he was. He’d likely never been beaten by anyone, ever. Well, I’ve been beaten plenty of times and there’s something to be said for it: it’s how you learn what’s truly at stake. The world isn’t a romantic stage play; it’s not all love or glory. And a swordfight isn’t always about skill or strength; sometimes – maybe even most times – it’s about who’s willing to take a blow just to make sure he delivers a worse one to his opponent.
He lay in a heap on the ground at my feet, looking up at the ceiling as if Saints were coming down from the sky. I think he was in shock as much as he was in pain. I knew I had taken something away from him, something precious. He could have become a legend with the sword one day, maybe even surpassed Kest, but he would have been a monster, too. And I’m in the business of stopping monsters.
‘Let’s go,’ I said to Aline. The crowd was as still as stone statues but, when I moved towards the door, they parted for me. All except for Lorenzo’s woman, Etricia, who put up her blade and waved it at me.
‘Fight me!’ she cried.
I looked at her, all wounded pride and lovestruck. ‘No.’
‘Come on, you coward! What, you don’t think women can fight? Fight me like a man, damn you!’
‘Fine,’ I said, and knocked the point of her sword out of line and then kicked her between the legs as hard as I could. She dropped to the ground next to Lorenzo in visible agony. It was a mean and cheap move, but that day, in that damned city? On that day I was a very mean and cheap man indeed.
‘Anyone else?’ I asked the crowd.
‘Anyone else?’ I asked again, louder. My voice was tight, almost shrill. Usually after a fight I’m exhausted; I just want a bath and a bed. But something was different this time. I was angry – if anything, I was more angry than when I’d fought Lorenzo. He was the instigator, but these people had cheered him on. They weren’t monsters; they were the people who fed the monster.
‘Then take off your coats,’ I said.
They looked at me as if I was speaking another tongue.
‘Take off the coats. Take them off and put them in the fire.’
‘Falcio, stop,’ Aline said. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’
I ignored her and took a step towards the crowd. ‘Any man or woman who still has a greatcoat on by the time I reach them will get my sword in their belly. Take the fucking coats off and put them in the fire.’
They did, every single one of them. Etricia, still in some discomfort, was helped by another woman to get Lorenzo’s coat off. In the end, the large central firepit could barely contain them, and the flame threatened to go out from the weight of the leather. Gods, but it stank.
‘What … what do we do now?’ a boy barely out of his teens asked.
‘Get yourself something else to wear.’
No one tried to stop me as I pulled Aline along with me and out the door.