‘This is all seriously wrong,’ Alexius muttered. ‘When I think that for weeks now I’ve been on the receiving end of this level of mess, it makes my blood run cold.’
‘Serves you right,’ Gannadius replied, his eyes fixed on the contest. He was something of a connoisseur of the art of litigation, and this was very much a collector’s item.
The girl lunged left, and Loredan swerved out of the way; but the lunge had been a feint, and the blade was directly on line for his throat. A last frantic reflex allowed him to get his hand in the way. He deflected the blow, but the girl’s blade hit him squarely in the palm. From where he stood, Alexius could see an inch of the blade sticking out through the back of Loredan’s hand.
Now’s his chance, he told himself, and as Loredan lunged forward at the girl’s unprotected body, Alexius stepped between them and tried to catch the moment.
He felt nothing as Loredan’s sword ran him through – how could he, he wasn’t actually there? – but as he looked down and saw the blade vanishing into his own chest, he knew at once that he had made the worst mistake of his life. A moment later, the girl stepped round him and cut Loredan down where he stood; he collapsed, face down, leaving his sword stuck in the Patriarch’s body. Alexius was just wondering how this was possible when Loredan had been using a broken sword with no point when he woke up.
It was the pain in his chest and arms that had woken him; a heart attack, no question at all about that. Gannadius was still fast asleep, and Alexius couldn’t move or speak to rouse him. It was quite possible, he realised, that he was about to die. More than anything else, he found the idea thoroughly unfair.
Gannadius lifted his head. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘don’t worry. You’ll live.’
The pain stopped.
‘Keep still,’ Gannadius went on. ‘And calm down. Try and breathe normally.’ He stood up, stiff and awkward after his cramped sleep, and poured half a cupful of strong black wine. ‘This’ll help,’ he said. ‘Go on, drink it. If you were going to die, you’d be dead by now.’
Alexius made a face as the wine burnt his insides. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Was that a heart attack or was I stabbed?’
‘Both. My fault, I’m afraid. Give me the cup, I’ll get you another.’
‘Your fault?’
Gannadius nodded. ‘I had to do something to stop him killing the girl. Shoving you in the way was all I could think of. It’s just as well you weren’t really there, or it could have been very dangerous.’
‘Of all-’ Alexius waved the cup aside feebly. ‘You do realise what you’ve done,’ he said. ‘Now I’m under a curse of my very own. And the girl still killed him, so it was all for nothing.’
Gannadius shook his head. ‘Think,’ he said sternly. ‘You were under that curse already; that’s what’s been wrong with you these past weeks. All I’ve done is bring matters to a head, so to speak. No,’ he continued, ‘if it hadn’t been for me things would have been much worse. Loredan would have killed the girl, and then where would we all be?’
‘You’re not the one who’s going to get run through,’ Alexius pointed out. ‘At the very best, we’re back exactly where we started.’
‘Oh, no,’ Gannadius objected, ‘not at all. For one thing, we’ve done some extremely valuable practical research into an area of the Principle about which deplorably little was hitherto known. I shall write a paper about this.’
The Patriarch closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘That aside,’ he said.
‘That aside, I do believe we’ve made some worthwhile progress. Instead of having a vague idea that you were suffering from an adverse reaction but not knowing what form it’s taken, we now know exactly what you can expect. Likewise, we were in time to prevent the potentially disastrous consequences of this second intervention, no small achievement in itself. Add to that the fact that none of the reaction appears to have attached itself to me, and I believe we can congratulate ourselves on a job well done.’ Gannadius smiled. ‘And now I suggest that you try and sleep for a while. I’ll have a guest room made up for you. Heart trouble isn’t something to be taken lightly, you know.’
Alexius groaned. ‘What really depresses me,’ he said, ‘is that you and I are the world’s leading exponents of this particular skill. If this is the best we can do, perhaps we ought to leave well alone. For pity’s sake, we’re supposed to be able to do this sort of thing for a living.’
Gannadius looked at him for a long time. ‘A living,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you may care to rephrase that.’
The chief trainer was vexed.
‘True,’ he conceded, ‘there have been female advocates before. Some of them lived to be nearly twenty-five. But that was mostly because nobody wanted to hire them, so they scarcely ever got any work. You don’t want to join this profession. Go away.’
The girl said nothing; instead she held out a squat leather purse on the flat of her hand. The trainer couldn’t help noticing how full it looked.
‘We aren’t really equipped to take female students,’ he said. ‘We’d need separate changing rooms, and we simply haven’t got the space. Not to mention chaperones,’ he added, suddenly inspired. ‘And before you say you don’t need chaperoning, you try telling that to the Public Morals Office. That’s just the sort of thing that could get me closed down, just like that. And what about the costume?’ he went on, wondering why none of this seemed to be having any effect at all. ‘You couldn’t be expected to fight in trousers, and there just isn’t an accepted form of solemn-procedure dress for women in the courts. You’d be a laughing stock.’
The girl said nothing. The purse sat there on her palm. A sense of bewildering frustration swept over the trainer; why couldn’t he get through to this pig-headed girl? Over the years he’d talked literally hundreds of stupid young kids out of joining a profession in which they stood no chance of survival. He was a conscientious man and besides, he had his trainer’s licence to think of. He could just imagine himself trying to explain to a frantic mother and father and a stony faced Public Safety Office official why he allowed a slip of a girl to join up and get herself killed in her first fight. It was a fat purse, but not fat enough to compensate him for the loss of a business he’d been nurturing for nine hard years.
‘Please?’ he said. ‘If you won’t listen to sense, then at least go away and make life miserable for one of my competitors. I can give you a list of places to try.’
‘You’re the best,’ the girl said. ‘I want to learn here.’
Behind them, the long exercise hall echoed to the clatter of blades and the shouts of short-tempered instructors. The floor shook as thirty feet came down hard in unison in the first, second, third steps of the Orthodox guard, the back foot riposte, the fleche, the defensive lunge, the Southern parry, the fencer’s turn, the mandritta. Every day brought a fresh crop of bright, keen, idiotic young faces, of distraught fathers whose only sons had run away from home and family businesses to follow the wild dream of becoming a lawyer. Every week there were funerals to attend, new names to inscribe on the roll of ex-pupils who had given their lives for the profession. One way or another, the chief trainer saw an awful lot of young people with an urge to die, but never one as persistent as this. Mostly, he reckoned, it was the way she wasn’t pleading or cajoling or begging that was getting to him. It was as if she was demanding an inalienable right which he was trying to cheat her of on the flimsiest of pretexts. It’d serve her right, he told himself, if he did let her join.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘here’s the deal. You tell me why it’s so all-fire important to you to be an advocate, and then maybe I might be persuaded.’
Silence. For the first time, the trainer could sense a slight trace of reluctance; a questionable motive, perhaps, something on which he could quite reasonably base a refusal. He decided to press the advantage.