"Yes, My Lady, thank God, indeed." Hanks' resonant voice quivered with anger, and he turned her away from the crowd and produced a handkerchief. She took it and dried her eyes, still leaning against him, and he continued in that same harsh voice. "And thank you, too. If you hadn't reacted so quickly..." He broke off and shook himself, then drew a deep breath.
"Thank you," he repeated, "and I beg you to accept my apologies on behalf of Father Church. I assure you," he said, and if his voice was calmer, it was also harder, and more implacable, than she'd ever thought the gentle Reverend could be, "that Brother Marchant will be ... dealt with."
CHAPTER SIX
"Hail"
Honor's right foot came down on the polished floor, quickly and neatly, her weight centered, and her wooden practice sword flashed. Master Thomas' blade caught the head cut, and her left foot swept around behind her, carrying her to his left. She shifted her weight, driving his sword back to gain a split-second's freedom, then slid her own weapon down his, twisted her wrists, and feinted a cut to his left arm in a single blur of movement.
"Hail" she shouted again, diverting her stroke into a whistling torso cut as he moved to parry, but his parry had also been a feint.
"Ho!" He floated aside, graceful as a dancer or a cloud of smoke, and Honor grunted as his blade cracked down on her padded right forearm just before her own strike went home. She lowered her sword instantly and bent her head to acknowledge the touch which had preempted her own attack, then stood back and took her right hand from her hilt. She shook it for a moment, grimacing at the tingle in her fingers, and Master Thomas raised his mask with a smile.
"The best offense, My Lady, is sometimes to offer your opponent a juicy target in order to turn her attack against her."
"Especially when you can read her like a book," Honor agreed. She removed her own mask and mopped her face on the sleeve of her fencing tunic. It was similar in cut to the gi she wore for her coup de vitesse workouts, but stiffer and heavier. Grayson had long ago adopted high tech substitutes for more traditional fencing armors, and the tunic was designed to let her move easily yet absorb blows which could easily break unprotected limbs.
Unfortunately, it was not so well designed as to prevent bruising, for Grayson's swordmasters subscribed to the theory that bruises taught best.
"Oh, I wouldn't say you were quite that obvious, My Lady," Master Thomas disagreed, "but you might cultivate a more, ah, subtle approach."
"I thought I was being subtle!" Honor objected, but her fencing master shook his head with another smile.
"Perhaps against someone else, My Lady, but I know you too well. You forget this isn't a real battle, and you think in terms of decision. Given an opportunity to achieve outright victory, your instinct is to seize it even at the expense of taking damage yourself, and in a real fight, I'd probably be dead now, while you would simply be wounded. But in the salle, you must always remember that it's the first touch which counts."
"You did it on purpose, didn't you? Just to make your point."
"Perhaps." Master Thomas smiled serenely. "Yet it also gave me the victory, didn't it?" Honor nodded, and his smile broadened. "And whether I did it as an object lesson or simply to win is really beside the point. I was able to do it by taking advantage of the way you think, because I knew your arm cut would be only a feint when I offered you the opening to the body."
"Did you, now?" Honor cocked an eyebrow at him.
"Of course, My Lady. Did you really think my guard could be that weak by accident?" Master Thomas shook his head sadly, and Nimitz bleeked a laugh from his perch on the uneven parallel bars.
"You," Honor said, wagging a finger at the cat, "can just be quiet, Stinker!" She turned back to Master Thomas and tugged at the end of her nose while her eyes crinkled in amusement. "Would you have tried something like that against someone you didn't know as well as you know me?"
"Probably not, My Lady, but I do know you, don't I?"
"True." Honor shook her arm again. "It is a bit hard to surprise someone who's taught you everything you know, isn't it?"
Master Thomas grinned and raised one hand in the referee's gesture that signified a touch, and she chuckled. Thomas Dunlevy was the second ranking Swordmaster on Grayson, and she felt honored by his agreement to train her. Unlike Grand Swordmaster Eric Tobin, who'd out-pointed him by only the tiniest margin for the grand mastery, Master Thomas had no problem with the fact that she was a woman. Tobin had been horrified by the very notion of training a mere female; Master Thomas' only concern had been whether or not the mere female in question could master the sword, and, like virtually all Graysons, he'd seen the video Palace Security's cameras had shot the night Honor saved Protector Benjamin's family from assassination. Indeed, he'd agreed to teach her the sword without charge if she agreed to teach him coup de vitesse, and he was as vulnerable to surprises there as she was here.
Honor had accepted willingly, and not just because she loved teaching the coup. For most Graysons, the sword was simply another form of athletic competition, and that, in great part, was how Honor saw it, too. Yet it was more than that for her, as well. She was the only living holder of the Star of Grayson, which, by law, made her Protector's Champion, and the Protector's symbol was not a crown, but a sword. It had been a bit difficult for Honor to learn the trick of substituting "the Sword" where a subject of Queen Elizabeth would have said "the Crown," but she was getting the hang of it, just as she'd learned that Graysons used "the Keys" to refer to the Conclave of Steadholders.
But the point was that Benjamin Mayhew's symbol was a sword, and that archaic weapon had a very special significance here. Any Grayson could learn the sword, but the law allowed only those who'd attained at least the rank of Swordmaster, or those who were Steadholders, to carry a live blade. And while Grayson had no equivalent of Manticore's code duello, its fundamental law still enshrined any steadholder's right to trial by combat against the Protector's decrees. No one had resorted to it in over three T-centuries, yet the right remained, and such challenges could be settled only with cold steel.
Honor had no expectation of ever being called upon to fulfill her obligation as Benjamin IX’s champion, but she didn't believe in surprises, either. Besides, it was fun. Her own training had never included weapon work, for the coup was strictly an unarmed style, but it had given her a firm basis for Master Thomas' lessons, and she'd found the elegance of steel suited her, though it wasn't a bit like the sports of foil and epee fencing still practiced in the Star Kingdom of Manticore.
Grayson's original colonists had fled Old Earth to escape its "soul-destroying" technology, and the first few generations had renounced technological weapons. But they'd still been products of an industrial society, with absolutely no background in the use of primitive weapons, so when the sword reemerged among them, they'd had no basis on which to build the techniques for its use. They'd had to start from scratch, and, according to Master Thomas, tradition held that they'd based their entire approach on something called a "movie" about someone called "The Seven Samurai."
No one could really be certain after so long, since the "movie" (if there'd ever truly been such a thing) no longer existed, but Honor suspected the tradition was accurate. She'd done some research of her own after beginning her lessons and discovered that "samurai" referred to the warrior caste of the preindustrial Kingdom of Japan on Old Earth. Grayson's library data base contained virtually no information on them, but her request to King's College on Manticore had produced quite a bit of background, and Master Thomas had joined her study of it with intense interest.