‘For me?’ Colonel Loredan asked, puzzled.
The guardsman nodded. ‘Bloke left it about an hour ago,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t give his name. There’s a letter with it.’
‘Oh. Oh, well. Thank you, dismissed.’ The guardsman saluted and left, closing the door behind him.
Back in his miserable cell in the second-city gatehouse; same bleak stone walls, same stone shelf for a bed. Loredan looked at the bundle of cloth in his hand, shrugged and tossed it onto the bed-shelf. Something metal rattled against the stone. He’d open it later, after he’d got out of these hateful boots.
Why should anybody leave me a present? he wondered, as he dragged the left boot off his hot, sweaty foot. Although he was already late for a meeting he allowed himself the luxury of sitting and wiggling his newly liberated toes before putting on his sandals. And why couldn’t it be something useful, like a nice pair of felt slippers?
Next he pulled off his coat, sopping wet from the afternoon’s sudden downpour, and reached for his second best; an old friend, shabby and frayed but nicely moulded to his body by years of close association. Not the most appropriate attire for an audience with the Prefect, but he didn’t exactly care too much if he got fired. His shirt and trousers were wet too, but he couldn’t be bothered to change them. The heat of the fire in the reception room of the Prefect’s palace would dry them off soon enough.
A quick drag of a comb through his hair; that would have to do. Now then; he’d open his present, and then he’d have to go.
It didn’t take a genius to work out what was inside the cloth wrappings; a narrow, heavy bundle roughly two and a half feet long containing something metal. Someone had sent him a sword. He could do with one, sure enough. It was embarrassing for the Deputy Lord Lieutenant, the officer commanding the defences of Perimadeia, to be the only man on the wall with an empty scabbard swinging from his belt. He slit the string with his knife and peeled away the cloth; then sat quite still for a moment, staring.
A genuine Guelan. More than that; a genuine Guelan broadsword – there were only about five of them still in existence – rather than the more common but still murderously valuable law-swords that the great smith had made his reputation with. Yet a Guelan it undoubtedly was, he knew that before he drew the short, heavy blade from the scabbard and found the distinctive and uncopiable marks on the ricasso. No one had ever made military swords like the great Liras Guelan. Other makers’ imitations were dull abortions, fit only for chopping wood or opening barrels. Nobody before or since had hit on that precise harmony of weight and balance that made it the next best thing to perfect, for single- or double-handed use, cutting or thrusting.
There was a special skill to using them, so the legend went (and for the first time, as he held the sword in his hands, he realised it was no fairy tale); if you tried to use it like an ordinary sword, the weight of the blade and the proportions – long handle and short blade – would defeat you. The harder you tried, the more effort you put into it, the more sluggishly the weapon would handle. But if you used the weight rather than fighting to overcome it, then the sword would seem to guide itself, adding its own force to the blow in apparent defiance of all the laws of physics. A Guelan broadsword, they said, should be allowed to fight for you; it knew exactly what it was doing, and all the wielder had to or should do was hang onto the blunt end and watch the fun.
Bardas Loredan had his doubts about people who waxed lyrical over lethal weapons; even so, he felt he could make allowances in this one rather exceptional case. All his working life, it went without saying, he’d wanted one (though it wouldn’t have done for work, being outside the prescribed dimensions for legal use), and now here one was, its weight firm but not oppressive against the muscles of his upper arm, like a pedigree falcon deigning to sit for a time on his wrist.
This must have cost a fortune. He remembered the letter. Not wanting to put his marvellous new possession down, even for a moment, he fumbled awkwardly to break the seal and open the folded paper.
Bardas-
I assume you got my message and the letter that followed it, so obviously you don’t want to see me. I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ll understand if you don’t want to accept this from me (though you’d be a damn fool not to; you wouldn’t believe the trouble I had tracking one down, and when I found it the owner didn’t want to sell). Take it, though; it can’t be blamed for the sins of the giver, and you’ll find a use for it, I’m sure. I’ve told it to keep you safe; that’s why it had to be a Guelan – aren’t they supposed to have minds of their own? Try not to break this one.
With my love,
Gorgas Loredan.
Bardas Loredan looked at the letter, then at the sword, then back at the letter, then back at the sword. Weapons, he knew, are ambivalent, capable of doing good or evil, or both, or both together, incapable of knowing or caring about the use to which they’re put. The same, Loredan reflected, is true of the lawyer, the man who fights and kills for a cause not his own in the name of justice. The weapon in his hand and the skill that hand imparts to the weapon decide right and wrong, good and evil; but the stronger and quicker on the day prevail over the slower and weaker, and if a moment before the fight the defendant had taken over the plaintiff’s brief and vice versa, it’s hard to believe that the outcome would be different. Maybe that’s what I’ve become, Loredan thought, or maybe that’s what I’ve been all along; a weapon in someone else’s hand, created to kill and do damage, either for good or for evil depending on whose hand I happen to be in. And the Guelan – aren’t they supposed to have minds of their own? – perhaps it means something, arriving precisely now, when I’m the advocate instructed on behalf of the city of Perimadeia, entrusted with its defence and the righteousness of its cause.
It must have cost him a fortune… Yes, and over the years he’s cost me; maybe somehow he’s been using me, along with all the others, though I can’t imagine what for. It’s been his actions that have governed everything I’ve ever done, since that day beside the river when he left me for dead and took away the life I should have had. If he thinks he can buy me with this-
But a Guelan broadsword; it wasn’t answerable for the sins of the giver, just as the lawyer isn’t responsible for the acts of his client. Above all, they’d told him when he took his oath at the enrollment ceremony, an advocate fights for justice, and justice is his only client. And a sword cuts skin and flesh for the man who swings it; and a man is a sword in the hand of his own circumstances, the things that have happened in the past that have made him what he is and their consequences in the present that he must address and deal with. Taking this from his brother wasn’t all that different from taking the sword of the man he’d just killed on the floor of the courthouse. He’d earned it, in that sense; and once it was his, its past no longer mattered.