The Frank had broken his nose.
Through the haze of his vision, he saw the sword whipping around to finish him with a blow to the left side of his head. Disoriented, his stance wobbly and not stable, he was in danger of being knocked senseless. If he let the blow land. Blocking out the pain in his face, he concentrated on his hands, forcing them to respond to his demands. The staff swung up-agonizingly slowly, it seemed-and the two wooden weapons loudly crashed against one another as he fought to remain on his feet.
It was like sparring with Taran, Andreas realized. Getting his hand on the Easterner’s wrist had opened the other man’s defenses, and the strike to the nose-with the commensurate flow of blood-had evened the score. But the fight was far from over. It’s not truly a fight until both are bleeding.
The nose? Taran had laughed once when Andreas had landed a lucky strike. That barely counts. And he had swiftly demonstrated to the younger Andreas just how little a broken nose slowed down a resourceful and practiced fighter.
Andreas kept up the pressure on the Easterner, striking from both sides. Each attack was parried, but he could sense his opponent’s increasing desperation. His opponent’s balance had been direly shaken; Andreas could feel how unstable his stance was in how the staff bounced against the wooden sword. With each strike, the Easterner’s balance slipped a little further. He will have to yield soon, he thought. One of my blows will get through, and then-
The Easterner didn’t try to block the next jab, and his left hand snaked out-the arm he had hit with the staff! — and grabbed the tip of his sword. It was a move that would be dangerous, if not outright deadly, to try with a real sword, but with wood, it was a sneaky, but clever, trick.
Andreas could be clever too, and instead of getting into a tug-of-war for his weapon, he let go of his waster, leaving his opponent holding two long weapons by their ends. His hands free, Andreas made to finish the fight with a grappling move.
As he’d been taught, and had done hundreds of times, his left hand reached toward his opponent’s throat, and his right came up for a hammer blow to the temple. His vision flashed, and his hands were suddenly not where he wanted them to be; his head rang, and rippling lines of agony ran down his frame. Dimly, he realized what had happened: as he had closed to grapple, the Easterner’s thumb had darted out and jammed itself into one of the energy points in his neck.
Again, his conditioning and training saved him, and he reacted with a knee strike, which only slid off his opponent’s thigh, expertly moved to protect the groin. His left hand was over the Easterner’s shoulder, so Andreas shifted to grab his opponent’s neck. He braced the other man as he threw his head forward, trying to smash his forehead against the other man’s broken nose.
But the Easterner wasn’t there; he’d slipped around to Andreas’s left. Andreas was still throwing his weight forward, and combined with the lock the man now had on his left arm, he was hurled off his feet, face-first into the dusty ground.
Spitting out dirt, he rolled to the side, getting his feet under him again. He had fallen on top of his sword, and his hands had unconsciously grabbed the weapon. As he came to his feet, he discovered two things: the first being that his right hand was on the pommel of his wooden sword; the second was that his left arm refused to work. Dislocated, but not broken, he hoped.
His opponent had taken advantage of the throw to go for his own weapon. He held his staff in that shortened two-handed grip Andreas was coming to be wary of, and his face-not very pretty before-was a mass of blood and swollen flesh now.
Andreas turned his body slightly, angling his right shoulder toward the man, moving his sword behind his body to hide it from his opponent. No use trying to do anything with the left arm anymore. He was a single-handed opponent now. His choices were fewer; his tactical options much less complicated.
He had no doubt this was the man who had beaten the Livonians at the bridge. This had to be the Flower Knight. The fight was coming to its inevitable conclusion. One more pass would probably be all it would take. One more chance to deliver his message.
Andreas smiled. If his plan worked, then losing this fight would be worth the reward…
Come at me, then. Let’s finish this.
Kim was surprised at the failure of his thumb strike to the Frank’s energy point. A secret technique of the Flower Knights, the strike should have paralyzed the man’s entire body, but instead, the Frank had only lost the use of his left arm. In any other situation, Kim would have been fascinated by this revelation, for it suggested the Rose Knights had access to esoteric fighting styles, techniques that relied on a man’s understanding of his opponent’s energy centers. As it was, not only was the Frank still standing but he had retrieved his sword and had adopted a truly defensive stance. It looked almost coy, the way he was hiding behind his own body, but Kim was wary of the fact he could barely see the other man’s weapon.
It was a good stance, probably one that was very effective against another edged weapon, but the staff worked better as a thrusting and jabbing weapon, and after a few weak parries on the part of the Frank, both men realized the staff was ultimately going to win. With one hand, the Frank beat each of his attacks back, but he was forced to give ground with each parry.
Kim recovered badly from a wild sweep of the sword after a parry, exposing his left shoulder, and the Frank took the bait, sensing this was his one hope to regain the fight. Kim was ready, though, as the recovery had been a feint, and the butt of his staff effortlessly pushed the wooden sword aside as it came toward him. Kim surged into the opening and, with a sharp snap of his wrist, clipped the Frank on the temple with the staff. The Frank stumbled, grunting in pain, and then crumpled to the ground of the proving field.
The roar of the crowd came back to him, shut out before by the all-consuming focus of the fight. Kim was breathing heavily, and out of the corner of his eye, he could already see an enormous confusion on the other side of the ropes as his Mongol guards tried to calm the surrounding crowd.
A hand grabbed his ankle, and he looked down, surprised. Didn’t the Frank realize he had lost? The Rose Knight was squinting up at him, his mouth moving. Was he praying?
No. He’s trying to tell me something.
He would not be able to celebrate his victory for long. The Mongols would drag him out of the ring in a few seconds. He had so little time.
Kim knelt beside the fallen man, slipping his hand behind the Frank’s head. The man’s gaze was fierce and unwavering, in spite of the blow to the head, and he hissed one word, loud enough for Kim to hear over the roar of the crowd.
“Hans.”
The boy’s name.
In a flash, Kim understood. He and the Rose Knights did not share a common language; it would be difficult for them to communicate effectively. But they did share one thing in common: the friendship of the boy. “Hans,” he repeated.
“Hans,” the Frank said the boy’s name one last time, as if to seal the understanding that had passed between them. The boy would carry their messages. The two of them stared at one another for a moment that stretched longer and longer, until Kim abruptly realized that the guards hadn’t yet come to retrieve him.