Upnor did a sideways roll away from Bob and came up angry. "You are a cold, cold, cold-blooded knave!" he exclaimed. "I think you do not care about Abigail at all!"
"I care enough to win this."
"You have been practicing against someone who knows the rapier," Upnor said. "Tell me, did he show you this?"
Bob liked to sit in a meadow and throw bits of bread to the birds. He had done this once with a flock of some hundred pigeons who had, once they'd gotten the general idea, surrounded him and waited patiently for him to throw out each scrap. But presently a sparrow had come along and begun to collect evey last crumb that Bob tossed, even though it had been one against a hundred. Even if Bob lured the sparrow to one side, then threw the morsel to the other, the little bird would come across like a flash of light from a signal-mirror and wend its way among the stumbling pigeons and pluck the bread right out from under their open beaks, which would snap together on thin air.
Bob now learned that he was a pigeon and Upnor a sparrow. One moment he was certain that his spadroon was about to take Upnor's leg off at the knee, and the next, the Earl was somewhere else, and the point of the rapier was headed for Bob's heart. In desperation he pawed at it with his left hand and diverted it so that it got him just under the ribs on the right side and passed out his back. As Bob fell back, his flailing left hand struck the guard of the rapier, a swirl of silvery bars, and his fingers closed around it. This would prevent Upnor from drawing it out and stabbing Bob again and again as he lay on the ground. Bob landed flat on his back, preceded by that part of the rapier that had gone all the way through him, and found himself pinned, nailed like Jesus. Upnor was pulled forward and ended up staring down into Bob's face from not far away.
"Lung?" Upnor guessed.
"Liver," Bob said, "or else I could never do this." He inhaled and then spat at Upnor's face, but it came out as a feckless spray.
"'Twill be a slow-festering wound then," Upnor said. "I will gladly supply you with a quicker death if you will be so good as to let go my weapon." He glanced up for a moment, distracted by the sound of hurtling cavalry. "Sarsfield," he pronounced. "Let us finish, I must go to them."
Bob turned his head sideways, just to get Upnor's visage out of his sight. He saw a queer thing silhouetted against the deepening gray sky above the hilclass="underline" a fellow in a gray coat perched on a pole above a ditch, not far away. No, he was not perched, but swinging across it, a matted ponytail trailing behind him like a profusion of battle-streamers from a regimental flag. It was an Irish infantryman, pole-vaulting across the ditch. Coming to the aid of Upnor, his English overlord. He would probably have a dirk or something to finish Bob off with.
"When you go to the next world," Upnor said, "tell the angels and demons that we know everything about your infamous cabal, and that we will have the gold of Solomon!"
"What the bloody hell are you talking about!?" Bob exclaimed. But before answering, Upnor peeled Bob's hand off the guard, pinky first. He planted his foot in Bob's stomach and stood up, yanking the blade out.
"You know perfectly well," he said indignantly, "Now go and do as I have instructed you!" He aimed a death-blow at Bob's heart. Bob put his hands up to slap it aside. Then a large object hurtled across the sky and smashed into the rapier's guard, crumpling the bars and sending it spinning away.
Upnor staggered back, gripping a damaged hand. Bob looked up to see a bulky figure in a ragged muddy gray coat, gripping eight feet or so of pike-staff: the same bit that Bob had broken off the cavalry standard.
Bob levered himself up on his elbow and rose to a seated position to find the cool, level gaze of Teague Partry directed his way. Teague had a head like a cube of limestone, and brown hair pulled back tight against his skull, though many strands had come loose during the day's fighting and been plastered back with mud. His blue-gray eyes were set close together, redoubling the intensity of his glare.
"What d'you think y'are, a character in a friggin' novel, Bob? Can you not perceive that the gentleman is wearin' armor, and knows more concernin' swordsmanship than you ever will?"
"I perceive it well enough now, Teague."
Upnor had, during Teague's scolding of Bob, gone over and retrieved his rapier. He held it now in his left hand, advancing crab-wise toward Teague.
"Look out, Teague, he's as dangerous with his left as he is with his right—"
"Bob! You make too much and too little of him at the same time. As a 'fencer he's a caution, 'tis plain enough to see, but in the larger scheme, Bob, what is he but a friggin' tosser wavin' a poker around in the dark." By this time Upnor had advanced to within about eight feet and so Teague gave his stave a toss upward, gripped it with both hands at the end, and with a grunt, swung it round in a long arc parallel to the ground, catching Upnor in the side and flattening him. Upnor made a grab at the end of the staff, which had ended up hovering over his face, but his movements were cramped by his steel cuirass, which now sported a huge dent jabbing deep into his side. Teague withdrew the stave, shifted his grip so that he was holding it in the middle, raised it up above his head, and began to execute a series of brisk stabbing motions, with the occasional mighty swing. These were accompanied by metallic bashing sounds and screams from Upnor's end of the stick.
Between these efforts he sent the following, loosely connected string of comments and observations Bob's way:
"You have responsibilities now, Bob. You must lose this naïve understanding of violence! You are embarrassin' me in front of the lads! You can't play by their rules or they'll win unfailingly! You don't engage in courtly play-fightin' with one such as this. You get a great friggin' tree-branch and keep hittin' him with it until he dies. Like that. D'you see, boys?"
"Aye, Uncle Teague," came back two voices in unison.
Bob looked to the other side of the ditch and saw a pair of blond lads there, each holding the reins of a horse. One of them—it looked like Jimmy—had the horse Bob had rode in on, and the other—by process of elimination, Danny—had the standard-bearer's.
"There," Teague said. "Now get you over the ditch and be gone with the lads."
"I've been run through the liver."
"All the more reason to stop your lollygaggin'. You'll bleed to death shortly or heal up in a few weeks—the liver has a miraculous power of regeneration, while the body lives. Take it from an Irishman."
Bob slumped forward on his hands, then got his knees under him. He could hear blood dripping onto the ground. But it was only dripping, not coming in a continuous stream, or (worse) a series of spurts. If he had seen a private soldier with such a wound, he'd have guessed that the fellow would live, once the wound was packed with something to stop the bleeding. Upnor had been right; if Bob died of this, it would be because it festered in the days to come.
"I'm not askin' you to walk. You may ride one horse and the boys may share the other."
"And you, Teague?"
"Oh, it's into the ditch with me, Bob, into the bog. I'll collect a musket from one of the Englishmen I killed today, and go a-rappareein'." Teague's eyes now turned into running pools, and he tilted his head back and sniffled. "Get you gone, none of us has a moment to waste."
"I'll raise a monument in London," Bob promised, and got up slowly. He did not pass out.
"To me? They wouldn't have it!"
"To Upnor," Bob said, staggering past the Earl's smashed corpse, and kicking the rapier aside into the watercourse. "A fine statue of him, looking just as he does now, and an inscription: ‘In Memoriam, Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, finest swordsman in England, beaten to death with a stick by an Irishman.' "