“How?” Stephanie asked, leaning forward again and putting her hand on his knee, under the water.
It had been a long year so he recited some more multiplication tables.
“Tarson had been sending parties to raid the outlying farms,” Herzer said. “Look, do you really want to hear this?”
“I want all of it,” Stephanie said, throatily.
“I want to hear it, too,” David replied when Herzer just looked at her, his face blank and hard.
He looked up at the ceiling when he realized other people, including the Blood Lord instructor he had seen across the room, had gathered around. He thought about the blood, the hacked remnants of what had been human beings scattered across a farmer’s field. He realized what his face must look like so he, with difficulty, slid a friendlier mask onto his face.
“Tarson had been sending raiding parties out,” he repeated, turning to look at Shilan. “They’d burned a couple of the farms in the area that wouldn’t, or couldn’t, pay their ‘taxes.’ I took to riding around…” He paused and shrugged.
“Blood Lord training is designed for formation; fighting as an individual is entirely different. But we cross-train.” He looked over at the instructor from the Academy who nodded at him. “I’d… done more cross training than normal, for that matter. Anyway, I was out at one of the farms, just visiting. I’d been riding around to them, helping out sometimes, meeting people. And there was a scream from outside and Diablo was whinnying.” He closed his eyes and tried to smile but it just wouldn’t come.
“The farmers had a daughter, just about eleven. When I got outside some of the Tarson had her on the ground. Others were headed for the house, torches in their hands. I… well, it gets pretty blank in that kind of combat. My shield was on Diablo but I was in armor. They weren’t.” He stopped talking.
“That’s it?” Stephanie said after a long pause. “What’s the rest of the story?”
“The rest of the story is in the after-action report,” the instructor said. “Fifteen raiders, motley weapons. Axes, swords, spears. One Blood Lord. You did us proud that day, Lieutenant.”
“Thank you, sir,” Herzer said, modestly, trying very hard not to remember. “I don’t really remember most of it,” he lied.
“What happened to the girl?” Shilan asked.
“She’s never going to look at slaughtering the same for the rest of her life,” the instructor said, grimly.
“She was fine,” Herzer said. “Shaken up, but fine. They hadn’t had time to get their pants down much less get stuck in. I talked to her a few times afterwards; she needed to talk it out and she didn’t feel like she could with anybody else. She’s fine.”
“You’re not much of a storyteller are you?” Stephanie asked.
“It’s hard to talk about some things with people who haven’t been there,” Herzer admitted with a shrug. “The… feel of your sword crunching through a rib cage is difficult to describe. What it feels like to have your sword stuck in a corpse’s spine while someone is hammering on you with an axe. What a field looks like after you’ve chopped a dozen human beings into their constituent parts. Having to decide whether to try to save someone’s life or just give them mercy.”
“I take it back,” Stephanie said, leaning back. “You can feel free to leave out the little details.”
“I didn’t care about the ones headed for the house,” Herzer said, suddenly loquacious. “If I raised enough of a ruckus they would either run to help or run off. I do remember bowling a couple of them over as I went through, and…” He looked up and his right hand made a motion like a butterfly drawn in air. “And a bit more to a couple of others. I made a mistake with the girl, though. I was so angry. The guy who was trying to rape her… his teeth chattered on my sword blade like a toy. Chit-chit-chit-chit-chit. That was when it got stuck, in the back of his brain really.” There were grimaces in the audience but he didn’t notice, being somewhere else.
“I’d kicked one of the guys holding her down on his face but another one was hitting me on the back with an axe. It was just bouncing off my armor so I turned around and punched him and took his axe away. I chopped a space around me and got my sword freed up.” He shook his head and shuddered.
“What?” Shilan asked.
He shrugged and made a stomping motion as his gripped hands moved back and forth as if he was trying to free something. More grimaces, including from Shilan who clearly wished she hadn’t asked the question, and a few of the audience wandered off, hurriedly.
“Diablo had turned up by that time and I made sure he didn’t step on the girl. The ones who had been planning on burning the house were headed back by then and some of them threw spears. I remember one of them bouncing off the armor and another stuck. That just gave me another weapon. I hit them with that for a while, until it broke, then went back to the sword. When there weren’t any more people bothering me, or the girl, or my horse, I went over to the spring and cleaned up.”
“Tired?” the instructor asked, professionally.
“Not really,” Herzer said. “A bit of a case of the shakes, but it hadn’t taken five minutes, all total.” He stopped and shrugged. “It was more like a not particularly intense drill. They weren’t very good.”
“ ‘Nah, fifteen of ’em,’ ” Stephanie mimicked. “ ‘Wasn’t really what you’d call a fight.’ Lord! Brag for God’s sake!”
“Why?” the instructor said, lightly. “I’ll admit that it was a tough fight. There are few among the Blood Lords who would have done as well. I doubt that I would have. But for Herzer, yes, it was child’s play. He is the Blood Lord’s Blood Lord, the icon that we hold up to the students, just as this young lady said. I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” he added.
“Shilan,” Shilan said. “I hadn’t realized that you heard.”
“I’d moved over. The point is that the Blood Lords train to do one of three, or all of three, things to their opponents. Outmaneuver them, chop them to ribbons and if all else fails outlast them. We do that partially by being able to rotate units, but the individual Blood Lord is trained to fight, literally, for at least an hour without being significantly fatigued. A five-minute fight — he shouldn’t have broken a sweat.”
Stephanie leaned sideways in the pool and supported herself on one elbow, arching her back slightly towards the instructor.
“In pretty good… shape then, eh?” she asked, tossing her head so her hair swung back and forth.
The instructor just looked at her for a moment, then nodded sharply.
“Pretty good, yeah.”
Stephanie languorously slid back to her place and took a deep breath as she smiled up at him.
“I’m so glad to have such big strong men guarding us!”
Herzer gripped the bridge of his nose to keep from laughing, hiding his face behind his hand. He looked sideways and saw that Shilan was just staring at the woman, her mouth open. She closed it after a moment with a clop.
“Whatever were we talking about?” Stephanie asked.
“I dunno,” Herzer said with a laugh. “Economics comes to mind for some reason.”
“Why economics?” Stephanie asked, clearly puzzled.
“Because it’s the most boring subject I can imagine,” Herzer answered, laughing.
“Oh, I dunno,” Stephanie replied, pushing her hair back with both hands behind her ears and then posing with them out to the side as she thrust her chest forward. “Derivatives can be fascinating.”
Herzer laughed again and shook his head at her incredible forwardness.