“Rapier, excellence,” said young Polliex, the graceful dark-haired boy from Estotilaup, Earl Thanesar’s second son. “Tomorrow’s the day for singlesticks, sir.”
“Rapier. Ah. Yes, of course, rapier. No wonder you’re all wearing your masks.” Septach Melayn put the error behind him with a shrug and a smile.
There was a time when he had regarded little errors of memory as sins against the Divine, and did penance for them with extra hours of sword drills. But he had lately made a treaty with himself, and with the Divine as well, concerning such errors. So long as his eye remained keen and his hand was still unfaltering, he would forgive himself for these small slips of his mind. As a man ages he must inevitably resign himself to the sacrifice of one faculty or another; and Septach Melayn was willing to give up some fraction of the excellence of his memory if in return he might keep the unparalleled flawlessness of his coordination for another year or three, or five, or ten.
He selected a rapier from the case of weapons against the wall and turned to face the class. They had already formed themselves in a semicircle, with Polliex at his left and the new one, the girl Keltryn, at the opposite end of the row. Septach Melayn always began the day’s work with one end of the row or the other, and Polliex always managed to position himself in a favorable place to be among the first chosen. The girl had very quickly picked up the trick from him.
There were eleven in the class: ten young men and Keltryn. They met with Septach Melayn every morning for an hour in the gymnasium in the Castle’s eastern wing that had been his private drilling room since the earliest days of Prestimion’s reign. It was a bright, high-ceilinged room whose walls were pierced by eight lofty octagonal windows that admitted copious floods of light until shortly after midday. Some said that the place had been a stable in the days of Lord Guadeloom, but Lord Guadeloom’s days had been very long ago indeed, and the room had been used as a gymnasium since time out of mind.
“The rapier,” said Septach Melayn, “is an exceedingly versatile weapon, light enough to permit great artistry of handling, yet capable of inflicting significant injury when it is used as an instrument of defense.” He scanned the semicircle quickly, decided not to choose Polliex for today’s first demonstration, and automatically looked over toward the other side, where Keltryn was waiting. “You, milady. Step forward.” He raised his sword and beckoned to her with it.
“Your mask, sir!” came a voice from the middle of the group. Tora-man Kanna, it was, the prince’s son of Syrinx, he of the dark smooth skin and seductive almond eyes. He was ever one to point out things like that.
“My mask, yes,” Septach Melayn said, grinning sourly. He unhooked one from the wall. Septach Melayn always insisted that his pupils wear protective face-masks whenever the sharper weapons were used, for fear that some novice’s wild random poke would take out a princely eye and create an inconvenient hullaballoo and outcry among the injured boy’s kinsmen.
One day, though, the suggestion had been made to him in class that he too should wear a mask, by way of setting a proper example. It seemed wildly absurd to him that he of all people should be asked to take such a precaution—he whose guard had never been broken by another swordsman, not even once, except only that time at the Stymphi-nor engagement in the Korsibar war, when he had taken on four men at the same time on the battlefield and some coward had sliced at him from the side, beyond his field of peripheral vision. But for consistency’s sake he agreed. Still, it was often necessary for his students to remind him to don the ungainly thing at the outset of each class.
“If you please, milady,” he said, and Keltryn moved into the center of the group.
Septach Melayn still had not fully adapted to the concept of a female swordsman. He was, of course, much more comfortable in the company of young men than in that of women or girls: that was simply his nature. There had always been a circle of them in attendance on him. But the fact that his pupils had always been male was not so much a matter of his preference as theirs; Septach Melayn had never so much as heard of a woman’s wanting to wield weapons, until this one.
The odd thing was that this Keltryn seemed to have a natural gift for the sport. She was seventeen or so, nimble and swift, with a lean frame that might almost have been a boy’s, and the exceptionally long arms and legs that were a mark of advantage in swordsmanship. She had her older sister’s coloring and her older sister’s sparkling beauty, but Fulkari’s every motion was infused with a soft seductiveness that was apparent even to Septach Melayn, though he did not respond to it, whereas this one’s movements had an irrepressible coltish angularity that seemed delightfully unfeminine to him. And one could never imagine Fulkari picking up a sword. The weapon seemed not in any way out of place in Keltryn’s hand.
She faced him squarely, holding her rapier at rest by her side. The instant Septach Melayn raised his weapon she lifted hers and turned sideways into the fencing position, ready to meet his attack. The profile she presented was a very narrow one: from her first day in the class she had bound her breasts with some tight undergarment so that it appeared she had none at all beneath her white fencing jacket. Just as well, Septach Melayn thought. He was unaccustomed to fencing with someone who had breasts.
This was the first rapier lesson since she had joined the group. Keltryn was holding the weapon oddly, and Septach Melayn shook his head and lightly tapped her sword downward. “Let us begin by considering the placement of the hand, milady. We use the Zimroel style of handle here: the grip is a longer one than you may be familiar with, and we hold it farther back from the guard. You will find it gives greater freedom of action that way.”
She made the adjustment. The mask hid any sign of embarrassment or displeasure over the correction. When Septach Melayn lifted his sword again, she raised hers, waggling it as if to indicate that she was impatient to begin the lesson.
Impatience was something he would not tolerate. Deliberately, he made her wait.
“Let us consider certain fundamentals,” he said. “Our intention with this weapon, as I believe you know, is to lunge and thrust, and to parry our opponent’s counterthrust, and to make our own riposte. The point of the weapon is all we use. The entire body is the target. You should be familiar already with all of that. The special thing I teach you here is the division of the moment. Have you heard the term, milady?”
She shook her head.
“What we say is, a good fencer must seize control of time, rather than being controlled by it. In our daily lives we perceive time as a continuous flow, a river that moves without cease from source to mouth. But in fact a river is made up of tiny units of water, each distinct from every other one. Because they move in the same direction they give the illusion of unity. It is only an illusion, though.”
Did she understand? She gave no clue.
Septach Melayn continued, “It is the same with time. Each minute of an hour is a separate entity. The same with each second of a minute. Your task is to isolate the units within each second, and to view your opponent as moving from one unit to the next in a series of discontinuous leaps. It is a difficult discipline; but once you achieve it, it is a simple thing to interpose yourself between one of his leaps and the next. For example—”
He called her on guard, took the offensive immediately, lunged and let her parry, lunged again and this time countered her parry by beating her blade aside, so that he had a clear path to the tip of her left shoulder, which he touched; and withdrew and thrust once more, before she had had time to register that she had been struck, and touched the other shoulder. A third time he slipped within her guard and touched her carefully, very carefully, at the bony middle of her chest, just above the place where he imagined the dividing point between her flattened breasts to lie.